concert reviews: The Barber of Philadelphia

I had two reviews in SFCV this week. Both of them were of concerts featuring music by Samuel Barber.

For the first review, amongst all the fluff that constitutes the SF Symphony's summer season, they did put on one substantive concert in the style of winter subscription concerts. And the focus was on the attractive but hardly crowd-favorite Barber Violin Concerto.

Most of the editing done on my submissions is excellent verbiage trimming, but this one did garble something I said about the Tchaikovsky Fourth. The published review says "The performance started off as slow and calm as possible under the score’s surging emotions, the contrasts not sounding ridiculous." What I meant was that the performance was as slow and calm as it could get without making the contrast sound ridiculous. I'm not sure what the point is in the published version.

But there's one other thing the editors did not change that I'm sure they would have if there had been any ambiguity to it. I wrote, and this is presented unchanged, that "Davies Symphony Hall was packed, more fully than is typical for a subscription concert." The last time I used phrasing like this, one of my readers was absolutely insistent that it meant what in this case would be that it was a subscription concert. My insistence that I was trying to contrast it with subscription concerts he brushed aside, in that other instance, as nonsensical. But it made sense to my editors.

The other review was of one of Music@Menlo's potpourri concerts. Half of the concert was the Viano Quartet playing the daylights out of the Barber and Ravel Quartets. The other half was of large miscellaneous chamber pieces that had a string quartet among the parts, but the Viano didn't play in them. Never mind: Menlo has a large stable of players to draw from.

The only editing problem in this one was that, in one place, the composition date that Menlo gave for a piece, of 1897, was changed to 1896, but not in the other place I mentioned it, making me appear slightly innumerate. But there's another thing that might confuse readers. I mentioned the Viano's first violinist Lucy Wang, but in the photo preceding it she's obviously the second violinist. Simple explanation: they switched between pieces, as violinists do in a lot of quartet ensembles. The text is about the Barber, the photo is of the Ravel. I would have mentioned this if I'd had more space, but the variety and complexity of this concert burst my word limit anyway.

Consequently, my biggest regret is no opportunity to describe the Koret Young Performers Concert earlier that day. These are the students aged 11 to 18 at whom the Café Conversations I described earlier were addressed. They will be able for the rest of their careers to burnish their credentials on having been in the Menlo Young Performers Program, because they were all fabulously good as the program participants always are. The best, I think, were the ones who played the finale of the Franck Quintet, possibly because they were the ones who were advised in a masterclass by the Viano Quartet. I was at that session last week. The Viano urged them to put more grit in their performance, and they did.

But it was all great. You have to just drop your incredulity when the concert begins and two eleven-year-olds, looking a lot younger than that, and a 13-year-old come out and do a completely professional job on a movement from a Haydn piano trio, having already charmed the audience by saying, in their spoken introduction, that Haydn's tumbling themes had reminded them of Winnie-the-Pooh chasing after a honey jar. One of the players was very nervous during the spoken introduction but showed no signs of difficulty playing, which demonstrates what I've heard classical musicians say about playing: you just practice over and over until every moment, every placement of the fingers, is completely internalized into muscle memory. It works.

Tolkien Studies update

The long-delayed Volume 20 (2023) of the journal Tolkien Studies has been published, and physical copies have made their appearance. It's 327 pages, with ten articles and the usual book reviews, Year's Work (for 2020) and bibliography (for 2021).

Electronic versions of the articles are not yet on Project MUSE, but should be within a couple of weeks.

Persons interested in ordering physical copies may do so here..

Volume 21 is not in stock, as the website implies, because it has not yet been published; however, it may be pre-ordered.

Persons interested in recent earlier issues should phone Duke UP Journal Services at the phone numbers provided.

Music@Menlo Café Conversations

Each year, the Music@Menlo festival schedules 2 or 3 "Café Conversations," hour-long talks or interviews about various musical topics. This year's were advertised as career-planning advice to the artists of Menlo's Young Performers Program, about 30 audition-selected kids from 11 to 18 in age. I think they were required to attend; at any rate, there they were, packed into the first three rows of the small lecture hall.

I attended the first one, which was billed as "The Role of the Music Critic." I'm a music critic, I wanted to know what my role is.

It was not what I expected. The speaker, Juliette de Marcellus, is a British writer who's stuck in a past that ceased to exist some 50 years ago, where the vast majority of music critics worked for smaller papers. They didn't necessarily know anything about music; what they did know was how to produce adequate journalistic copy in the two hours between the end of the concert and the paper's daily deadline. de Marcellus was quite aware that small-paper music criticism of this kind has nearly vanished, but she has no idea what's replaced it, and she kept returning to it. In her world, beginning professionals advance their careers by accumulating reviews (clipped out of the paper and pasted in a scrapbook, I suppose), and if their concert isn't reviewed, it's worthless to them professionally. Asked what musicians can do to contribute to the public conversation around careers, she suggested writing letters to newspapers: again, an idea at least 50 years out of date.

There was much more like this, and she meandered and ranted in a way that made some audience members think she must have been ill. She began by encouraging "stupid questions," i.e. don't be afraid to ask ones you fear might be naive, but whenever anyone spoke up, she interrupted their opening framing by snapping, "So what's your question?" and then answered it with "I'll get to that later" (only sometimes true). Wu Han, the festival's co-artistic director and the nominal interviewer, tried to rein her in, but it was like taming a bucking bronco.

de Marcellus did say, at the beginning, one true thing: that a critic is not "critical" in the usual meaning of that word, but is just a reviewer, like reviewers of books or movies, and whose function is as a guide and help for the audience.

That aside, she didn't say anything that could possibly have been of any help to these children facing professional careers, and I wanted to shout out to them, "Don't listen to anything she said! It's totally useless!" It was embarrassing to listen to advice to clip non-existent newspaper reviews to young players who've already earned a sterling credential to advance their careers by having been accepted to Menlo in the first place - festivals like this were a rare thing 50 years ago.

So I decided to attend the next week's Conversation, in hopes that it would act as something of a corrective and give some specific advice. For the most part, it didn't, though it was entertaining enough and at least coherent.

It was the other co-director, David Finckel, interviewing Dmitri Atapine and Hyeyeon Park about their careers. They're a married couple who play cello and piano, respectively, and for some years have been the directors of the Young Performers Program, so all those kids lined up know them well. Accordingly they said little about their role in the program. It was mostly an account of their training as students, followed by a lot of detail on the chamber music concert series they run at the University of Nevada-Reno, where they both teach. They talked about what they do, and why they do it, but not much about how it's done.

There were a few useful nuggets. Asked about competitions, Atapine said don't approach them hoping to win; that's the wrong and probably a hopeless attitude. Their use is as professional discipline practice: you've got to get a concert ready by such a time and you've got to give it your best. He advised building a concert series like theirs at Reno by inviting your friends and your mentors to perform. And they all emphasized that ancillary matters like marketing and stage direction contribute to the success of concerts.

So how do young players advance their careers today, if there's no scrapbooks of reviews to accumulate? They apply to audition for festivals and competitions, of which today there are many. They make professional-quality videorecordings of themselves and put them out where concert promoters can watch them. Nothing was said about most of this, but perhaps the students already know it all.

experience counts

Here's a list of the previous public office experience of each non-incumbent Republican Vice Presidential candidate since the end of WW2.

1948, Earl Warren: DA 14 yrs, state Attorney General 4 yrs, Governor 5+ yrs
1952, Richard Nixon: US House 4 yrs, US Senate 1+ yr
1960, Henry Cabot Lodge: state legislature 4 yrs, US Senate 13 yrs, Ambassador to UN 7 yrs
1964, William Miller: DA 3 yrs, US House 13+ yrs
1968, Spiro Agnew: county board 4 yrs, county executive 4 yrs, Governor 1+ yr
1976, Bob Dole: state legislature 2 yrs, DA 8 yrs, US House 8 yrs, US Senate 7+ yrs
1980, George Bush: US House 4 yrs, Ambassador to UN 2 yrs, Liaison to China 1 yr, CIA director 1 yr
1988, Dan Quayle: US House 4 yrs, US Senate 7+ yrs
1996, Jack Kemp: US House 18 yrs, Secretary of HUD 4 yrs
2000, Dick Cheney: White House Chief of Staff 1 yr, US House 10 yrs, Secretary of Defense 4 yrs
2008, Sarah Palin: city council 4 yrs, mayor 6 yrs, state commission chair 1 yr, Governor 1+ yr
2012, Paul Ryan: US House 13+ yrs
2016, Mike Pence: US House 12 yrs, Governor 3+ yrs
2024, JD Vance: US Senate 1+ yr

Notice that Vance is not the first one to have been in major office less than 2 years, but his predecessors in this distinction - Spiro Agnew and Sarah Palin, not an inspiring pair - at least had some previous local government experience under their belts.

concert review: Music@Menlo

Well, the Menlo festival began last week, and I'll have more to say about some of the exciting events later. But this was exciting enough. I'd expected to be going there last Sunday to review an afternoon violin and piano recital, but instead it turned into a concert of music for four hands at one piano. (It couldn't be two pianos, because they probably couldn't fit two pianos on to that tiny stage.)

So this is what I was doing while, unbeknownst to me until I got home after dinner out and read about it on the computer, Joe Biden was withdrawing from the presidential race.

It's unusual for me to like a work by Debussy more than one by Poulenc, but so it went.

Mythcon is coming

My paper being finished, it was time to turn my attention to the panels I'm scheduled to be on. I had to sort out and re-read all the e-mails to determine for sure how many panels there were (three) or remember what I had agreed to say. These are not open ad lib discussion panels of the kind science-fiction conventions have, but each panelist will give a 5-10 minute presentation; then there's discussion

One night recently I wasn't able to fall asleep, but the time wasn't wasted: I spent it writing up all my panel presentations and then timing them in the reading so that they came out right.

Now I'm prepared, and all I can do is hope that Delta will be: that's what we're flying, and they'd better get their schedule straightened out by this weekend like they keep promising.

concert review: Carmel Bach Festival

It's been a week - a very long week in the outside world - since I came home from two days at the Carmel Bach Festival, and my review has finally hit publication day at SFCV.

I'm satisfied with how I conveyed the impressions left by the music that I heard, but I said nothing about the logistics. So, here.

Parking in Carmel was pretty tight on Sunday when I arrived in late afternoon, having already claimed my hotel room in Monterey (only a ten-minute drive away, but much less expensive to stay at). I found a parking space on the uphill side of the shopping district, convenient for stopping in at an old favorite restaurant for dinner before continuing on to the theater, but that did mean a half-mile walk uphill back to the car when it was over. That was a bit much, and I sat at a bus stop and read for quite a while.

My tickets hadn't been obtained, and while the theater staff was able to accommodate me for the Sunday concert, they told me to phone the Festival box office in the morning for the rest. These folks said they were giving me everything for the day, including the Bach organ recital which I'd been intending to skip in favor of lunch. It was now after 10 AM, and the organ recital was at 11 at the Basilica out on the far edge of town. I hastened over to the one deli market I knew in town and grabbed some stuff for a makeshift lunch, keeping it in my car as I then drove out and looked for parking, ha ha, near the Basilica.

I'm glad I got to the organ recital, though: it was the best music-making I heard in the whole visit. As I sat there waiting for the recital to be over so I could visit the restroom (thus do our bodies betray us even during our most ethereal experiences), it occurred to me that if the critics hated Sibelius's Second Symphony because it keeps seeming like it's just about to end long before it does so, that Bach's organ music has the same characteristic.

Drive back into town, find one of the last parking spaces right by the theater, so no half-mile walk afterwards tonight. Eat my makeshift lunch, then a long walk to the Presbyterian Church for the master class. Get to the church. It has two doors, both locked. I'm stumped. Finally someone else comes along and suggests that a brick-laid garden path wandering off somewhere is the way uphill to the ground-level entrance to the second floor. That's where the sanctuary is, and that's where the master class is. Suggest to ticket-takers that a sign would be a good idea; no response.

Have to skip out early for another long walk to another church where the chamber music concert is. After that, finally a gap of free time. Dinner at a conveniently nearby restaurant that's new to me and very good. Back to the theater in time for the pre-concert talk and a brief concert by the volunteer Festival Chorus, which I forgot to mention in the review, blast it. Anyway, that's them in this concert in the photo in the review labeled "Singers at the Carmel Bach Festival," led by their conductor, John Swedberg.

Main concert, then that's it, back to my hotel room and home the next day.

computer issues

1. Everyone is remarking on Joe Biden having dropped out of the presidential race and endorsing Kamala Harris. Nobody seems to be remarking on the fact that he did both these things on (the service known until recently as) Twitter. The first thing I'd have done, were I a reporter charged with writing this up, would have been to phone the White House and ask, "Is this real or was he hacked?"

2. Opera, which for years has been the backup browser I used for anything Firefox hiccuped on, has suddenly broken. (This was yesterday, Sunday.) All sites now give me an error message of "This site can't be reached. The connection was reset." All suggestions I've received for fixing this are random lists of things you might try that are either 1) obviously inapplicable (your connection might be down [not if my other browser works fine on the same sites]; turn off some feature you never turned on); 2) don't work; 3) are hideously complicated and time-consuming to try (and after half-a-dozen that don't work, you're skeptical that these will). I don't want a random list of unlikely-to-work fixes; I want a diagnosis of the problem and then a fix for that.
Not getting one, I'm giving up on Opera. I have Edge anyway whether I want it or not, so I'm going to try that.

3. The airline meltdown caused by the CrowdStrike bug has impacted at least one person I know: the Music@Menlo publicist, whom I work with because of my reviewer duties, has been at least three days delayed in getting from her base in NYC to the festival, which started, ta da, on Friday. At least there is still e-mail, plus other staff members to step in.

4. This isn't about computers, but Mark Evanier is skeptical of stories of parents throwing away valuable comic books. It never happened to me; I never had any comic books and hardly ever read them. (I find a love for superhero comics as inexplicable as a love for dogs or for roller coasters.) But I had two male friends in college who testified that it happened to them in exactly the same way: not that their parents disapproved of comics or made their sons get rid of them. Instead, after they went off to college their mothers went through their belongings at home and threw out anything they wanted to throw out, without asking or even informing the person whose belongings they were.

the beard

So far, commentaries have been saying that J.D. Vance, who looks like this:

would be, if elected, either 1) the first Vice President with a beard since 1933 or 2) the first Vice President with a beard since U.S. Grant's Schuyler Colfax.

Both wrong.

The Vice President who left office in 1933 was Charles Curtis, and he had not a beard but a mustache:

Facial hair, yes; beard, no.

The most recent Vice President with a beard was not Colfax, who left office in 1873, but Charles W. Fairbanks, who left office in 1909 and looked like this:

Fairbanks shaved his cheeks, leaving his beard unattached to his top-of-head hair, but lots of men even today wear beards like that; they're still beards.

Incidentally, Vance's beard is nothing like Lincoln's. Lincoln shaved his mustache. Look:

He probably did that because in his day the mustache was firmly associated with military men, and even with a beard (which the archetypal military man did not wear), he didn't want to be associated with the military, resulting in a style of beard most associated with clergymen. Or, more recently, with this guy:


No, the other beard-wearer whom Vance most closely resembles is this guy:

Stephen Colbert suggested that, since DT couldn't choose that guy as his running mate, he picked the closest thing available, the one who'd play him in the Lifetime movie.

Two more things about Vance:

First, he's one of those people who gives Tolkien fandom a bad name. To political criticisms of Tolkien like Michael Moorcock's I have traditionally responded, "Tolkien isn't asking you to vote for him." Well, Vance is the kind of guy who doesn't realize that Tolkien isn't asking you to vote for him.

Second, Wikipedia is currently disputing the question of whether he should be listed as J.D. Vance, J. D. Vance, or JD Vance. Really they are.

not my day

I've been having online vendor problems.

Last night I went to my health care website to order some medication refills, only to find that the system had no record of my having any prescriptions on file at all. I called the help line, and after having gotten trapped several times in automated subsystems I didn't intend and having to hang up and call again to get out, finally reached a person by repeatedly pressing 0. Of course they couldn't fix it themselves, but they reset my account and then sent a trouble ticket to IT.
This morning I tried again and it worked OK.

Then I went to our grocer's website to place our big weekly order for pickup tomorrow. I was halfway through choosing the substitutes (you want to do this, otherwise if your item is unavailable they're sure to pick a substitute you don't want) when I started getting flashing messages that most of our items were not on the shelf, and then the substitute lists went blank, then the entire order disappeared. When I tried again, it wanted me to log in in a different way than I ever had before, and when I gave the information it said "Are you sure you want to change to a business account?" What? No! Start over yet again, redo the entire thing, it worked this time.
Let's see what happens when I go to pick it up in the morning. All kinds of weird things often happen at that stage.

Nothing went wrong in logging in to my monthly Zoom conversation. When I arrived, everyone else was discussing one person's acquisition of a new pet animal. They were already into the conversation, and nobody said for a while what kind of animal it was, dog cat or ?? When someone said the word "puppy," I had the weird sensation of feeling the wave function collapse.
But then B. came in and reported that her car was ready, which was a surprise because the shop had told her it wouldn't be done until tomorrow. But we had to go now to pick it up before they closed, so I had to bow out of the meeting.

I haven't been watching the RNC. I am not interested in what Republicans have to say. I am only watching the late-night comedians' reports, and skipping over the tape clips, also the parts where they irritatingly imitate DT's voice.

I see that Bob Newhart died. He was always very funny in a quiet, sneak-up-from-behind way, but I was never a big fan of his, because I found his calculated stutter to be too irritating to listen to for very long. I didn't like it much from Hugh Grant, either. It's entirely different when someone stutters naturally because they can no other - in any case the natural stutterers I've known don't sound like that.

been away

I'm back from a couple days out on the coast, where mostly it's cool. Stepping out of the car and feeling a cool breeze for the first time in months - I'd forgotten what one feels like. One day I even wore my light jacket for a while.

I went out there to hear music, but more about that later.

A couple major events happened in the world while I was gone, but contrary to declarations that everybody gets their news through social media these days, I did not. I don't read social media of the Facebook/Twitter sort, because I don't enjoy reading in such fragmented bites, and none of the bloggers I read has discussed the events directly, not even as of now. Instead, I got my news as I normally do, through the websites of newspapers and political commentary magazines or their simulacra.

calm down

The high-90s low-100s F heat wave (and higher inland) that's been hitting us continually since July 2 is finally breaking, and we're down to the mid-80s which is tolerable. I've been spending a lot of days in libraries for relief, and have entirely avoided using the oven. Once a week I make Chinese-style chicken salad, which is the only cold dinner in my repertoire. Meanwhile the oppressive heat is moving to the eastern US.

Tybalt has backed down from aggressive Defender of the Territory mode and is back to his normal rambunctiousness. But Maia, having been burned badly already, is having none of it and avoids him entirely, which leaves Tybalt rather lonely. Maia won't even come up into the bathroom to eat alongside Tybalt, so we have to take her dish downstairs, usually putting it by the living room couch, the underneath of which is her safe spot. It's armed camp mode.

one done

Well, I've finished my paper for Mythcon in three weeks. That will give me time to write the shorter presentations for the two or three (I'm not sure if the third one has been confirmed) panels that I'm on.

I've written several papers on "the minor Inklings" over the years, and decided that this was the year I was going to complete my long-mooted intent to write one on John Wain. At which point, especially when describing this orally, I have to confirm that that's WAIN not WAYNE and that they have nothing to do with each other. John Wain was a pupil of C.S. Lewis's whom he invited to the Inklings, but he didn't really fit in and much of my paper is about why. As a writer, he's faded into complete obscurity today, but on a time when Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim was first published, Wain's Hurry on Down came out almost simultaneously and was much discussed with it. They're remarkably similar novels in some respects, completely different in others. Amis and Wain had gone to the same college in Oxford at sort of the same time, and were friends. At least then; later their friendship decayed, mostly because Amis thought Wain was a pompous git. He wasn't entirely wrong.

Writing this paper went very fast, because I'd been holding most of it in my head for years. This includes summary characterizations of some of Wain's novels, which I read some 20 years ago but haven't forgotten. I got the books out to check the facts, but only afterwards.

Of course the first thing I did on completing the draft was to read it aloud to see how long it was. 40 minutes: that's about the maximum I can get away with without cuts. This procedure has the further advantage of bringing out verbal infelicities for correction.

world according to cats

Things are not going so well again.

One day recently while I was out, seeking relief from the heat, that cat from the apartment building next door showed up at our living room window again, curious about the cats it could see inside.

The cats inside, meanwhile, consider any other cats within their line of vision to be interlopers to be attacked with fury. This is normal expected indoor-cat behavior, and despite alarming hissing and fluffing it normally causes no harm, as the indoor cats can't get at the outdoor cat.

What's not normal or acceptable is that Tybalt, unable to get at that other cat, then takes his fury out on Maia. He's been going into attack mode whenever he sees her, and she, meanwhile, is terrified of him and keeps hiding. Peaceful coexistence, which was the case most of the time in the past, is gone.

What we've been doing about it:

1. Trying to block off the weak spot in the decaying fence by which the cat is entering our property. We're not handy types, so this is kind of awkward.

2. Installing a pheromone diffuser that's been recommended to us as a way to calm down overexcited cats. It doesn't work immediately, though.

3. Keeping them separated. When I was in college we had two cats who didn't get along, so we partitioned the house between them, which was easy because there was a heavy swinging door between the living room on one side and the kitchen on the other. But there's nothing like that here.

Maia has been spending part of the time living in B's office, where her food and water and a litter box have been installed. But she doesn't like being shut up in there, but she also doesn't like coming out only to find Tybalt. So part of the time we were letting Maia loose and shutting Tybalt up in the bathroom (the regular food and litter box location), where he howls like a banshee and hurls his little body against the door. Eventually we - and by "we" I mostly mean B., who has more cat experience and has been doing most of the heavy lifting here - let them both out and hope they don't kill each other.

Meanwhile we're watching the fence and hoping the outdoor cat doesn't get through again. If it does we'll paper over the window it goes to.

one more little anecdote

about the backyard party on the Fourth.

One of the Norwegian guests mentioned that he was reading, in English, the great Russian novel The Brothers ... and then he had trouble with the last word.

I knew how to pronounce Karamazov. Why do you think that is?

on the UK election

1. Contrary to the headlines, it's highly misleading to say that Labour won the election. They had little more of a vote percentage than the last election five years ago, when they did poorly in the results. What really happened this time is that the Conservatives lost decisively, and Labour got to pick up the pieces..

2. In the west of England, the Conservatives lost due to tactical voting for the Liberal Democrats, the longstanding third party, which has finally rid itself of the stain of its unfortunate coalition with the Conservatives in 2010-15, and now has more seats than it's had since its predecessor party in the 1920s.

3. In the east of England, they lost due to defections to Reform, which got a lot of votes but only 4 seats, fewer than they were expecting. That's specifically why Liz Truss, the infamous momentary prime minister, lost her parliamentary seat. And now Nigel Farage, Reform's toxic leader, is an MP. Well, there have been toxic MPs before and the kingdom has survived; remember Ian Paisley?

4. As of now, mid-afternoon Friday British time, two seats have still not declared a winner. What's with that? This was supposed to have been completed by early this morning.

5. Labour has about as many seats as it did during the last blowout, in 1997, and it follows the same pattern: purging the party leadership of its leftist elements and adopting some of the less savory principles of the Conservatives. Only this time, they went so far as to expel their previous leftist leader, Jeremy Corbyn. Who won his seat as an independent, a feat expelled party members rarely achieve. (Because tribal unity has been so strong in the UK, a feature now evidently on the wane.)

6. The main difference from 1997 is, though, that nobody seems very excited about Labour, as witnessed by their vote share and voters' comments. Maybe the voters learned their lesson from the overblown hopes of last time. Maybe it's because Labour's policies are so damp and unexciting, or maybe it's because Keir Starmer, the new PM, is damp and unexciting.

7. Starmer is so private that his two teenage children have never been seen in public and even their names are literally unknown. I'm astonished an intrusive media lets him get away with this.

8. Starmer is also an atheist. His wife is Jewish, and that's how they're raising their children, just about the only thing they've ever said in public about them. Hard to imagine an atheist getting elected to any major office in the US. Also, his wife is a vegetarian. Starmer himself eats fish but not other meat. Another thing hard to imagine among major politicians in the US.

9. The new Chancellor of the Exchequer is a woman, first ever in that job. Rachel Reeves is her name. They've had 3 woman prime ministers, but never before one of these.

heat

As you may have heard, we've been having a heat wave since Tuesday, with another three days at least to go. It's been over 100F here, and we're in the first valley in from the coast (which is moderated due to a cold current). Further inland it's much hotter. Fortunately it's dry in these parts and the temperature goes down, at least somewhat, at night.

Having no air conditioning here, we've used that fact to evolve a pattern for dealing with this. About 5 p.m., B. turns on the fan in the bedroom window. This cools the bedroom off enough by bedtime to sleep in. Further judicious window-opening elsewhere in the house also helps. Generally it remains tolerable until about 11 a.m. At that point I head out for lunch and then spend the afternoon in the public library, both air conditioned places. B. manages the heat better than I do and stays home and watches the cats.

Wildfires out in the mountains and prairies are extensive, but they haven't come around here. What I'm more worried about is something breaking out due to excessive illegal fireworks usage, but it's 11.30 pm on the Fourth now and I've heard much less random banging than in most years.

Since the libraries weren't open today (holiday, natch), I took advantage of the annual invitation to attend a backyard party at the house of friends in Berkeley, which is exposed to the Golden Gate and thus not quite so warm. Pleasant all day, and didn't cool down enough in the late afternoon too much: usually the stragglers wind up chasing the remaining sun across the back yard, but we didn't do that this year.

Pleasant conversations as usual. Hostess is recovering from knee replacement surgery and is reaching the point where the benefits outweigh the discomfort. Other interesting people around: how often do you meet someone whose job is drug-testing athletes in Oslo, Norway?

from the title by Harlan Ellison

Nigh on four years ago now, J. Michael Straczynski, executor of the estate of Harlan Ellison, announced that he would be completing and submitting for publication The Last Dangerous Visions, the long-lost anthology of other people's stories that Harlan had first announced for publication in 1973 and kept on dangling before the public, and the authors in it, with promises for another decade or so, but which kept sitting unpublished in his files for 45 years until his death in 2018.

Progress has been slow, but publication was eventually arranged and announced for Oct. 1 of this year. (To which many wits replied with the title of an old sf story, "October the First Is Too Late.") ARCs are apparently going out, and behold, here's the table of contents.

So what's in there? Harlan had kept buying stories for LDV while not publishing it, so there's no definitive list of what was to be in it, but the single most comprehensive TOC was one associated with an impending three-volume set that was scheduled to appear in 1979. It had, according to my count, stories by 98 separate authors in it. Another dozen or so stories have been known to be on the book's list at other times.

Again, according to my count, 14 of those 98 authors are on the current TOC, along with another 4 from the other miscellanea assorted list. A couple of the titles are different, so it's not entirely sure if they're the same stories. Leaving aside two authors for whom I have no information, 8 of the remaining 16 are deceased.

Plus another 6 stories newly commissioned and added.

As far as I know, only 2 of the 18 backlog authors are female, and only 1 of the 6 new ones is. At least 5 of the 6 are in their 50s.

Let's compare this result with what JMS originally announced in 2020. He notes that "a number of [the original stories] were withdrawn by the writers and published elsewhere," adding that "it makes no sense to republish stories that are otherwise available." Big of him; if the stories were withdrawn, then the Ellison estate no longer owns the rights. He also says that "some of the remaining stories have been overtaken by real-world events, rendering them less relevant or timely, and regrettably will be omitted," but he assures us that "many more" are still "fresh" (yes, after half a century) and that only a "few stories" will be omitted.

Let's note, then, that of the 98 stories on the 1979 list, by my latest count 36 have been published elsewhere by now - enough to make a heftier reprint anthology than the size of this book. With 14 of the remainder being published here, that leaves 48 stories which JMS chose to leave unpublished. That's a lot more than a "few," and includes never-seen work by authors such as Alfred Bester, George Alec Effinger, Vonda N. McIntyre, Edgar Pangborn, Mack Reynolds, Wilson Tucker - all of them deceased - and many others whose work, tucked away in Harlan's closet for decades, will still not be published. Though JMS says he will formally return the rights to all stories he does not include.

The discussion of what's new in the book also sounds as if it'll be a lot more extensive than what we see here, though it's known that a lot of authors JMS approached turned him down, largely due to not wanting to be associated with Harlan's besmirched reputation.

Then JMS writes of "one last, significant work by Harlan that has never been published" that will be included. There's no apparent trace of this in the TOC.

What he doesn't mention that I was most curious about was the introductions. Harlan wrote long and characterful introductions to the stories in his earlier Dangerous Visions anthologies, and when he announced various publication dates for LDV, he'd usually say something like "I just have to go home and finish up the introductions," but the introductions to a hundred-story anthology would be a massive project. Did he ever get them done? Apparently not, though he did start, because Harlan's introduction to exactly one story is included in the TOC.

So it's apparent that LDV as JMS announced it would be a massive project, much bigger than what's being published now, and I wondered if, like Harlan before him, JMS had simply bitten off something bigger than he could chew. My doubt that what he described was feasible, together with his disconcertingly Harlan-like insistence that it was really in the works, led one incontinent Harlan-booster to make the absurd claim that I was invested in the book never appearing. Why would I want that? All I wanted was not to be burned again as Harlan had burned the entire SF community many times.

Had I seen - which I did not, until now - a further announcement by JMS the next year, 2021, I would have seen him backing down. Here he admits that a large percentage, not just "a number", of the original stories were withdrawn, and points out that publishing anywhere near all of the remainder would result in too large a book to be feasible. Yes, well, Christopher Priest pointed that problem out in The Book on the Edge of Forever 30 years ago, so glad that JMS caught up. Though who knows ... with electronic publishing, length of text is less a restriction, but JMS is wedded to the idea of print, as he says Harlan was also.

The second announcement uses the fact that there was never a lasting definitive list of stories for LDV as an excuse for publishing only a tiny selection. That's a fakeout; Harlan's list did alter but it was always very long. And as far as I know he only ever added stories, not voluntarily took them away. JMS says that Harlan "was the first to say that some stories would have to be trimmed to make room for ones that were more current." I don't recall Harlan ever saying anything like that; do you? With that view he ought to have been relieved when space appeared, but he was extremely cross whenever any authors withdrew their stories.

And JMS includes in this second announcement a pitch promoting the idea of what it turns out now that he's actually publishing ... a small selection from The Last Dangerous Visions. Not LDV itself or anything like it, but a nugget. Well, it's better than nothing, to be sure, and I intend to read it; and despite his rhetoric it's a good thing that JMS chose to back down to a reasonable size rather than give up or disappear; but to read an announcement that says The Last Dangerous Visions will be published and then get this ... it's a deflating rather than fulfilling sensation. I was right, whatever the Harlan-boosters may say: what JMS originally described in 2020 could not and never would appear. But I'm not happy about it.

concert review: San Francisco Symphony

I didn't ask to review EPS conducting Mahler's Third. My editor assigned me the job and I didn't object. But I wasn't looking forward to it. The last time I heard the Third, MTT was conducting and I castigated myself afterwards for having subjected myself to an hour and a half of tedious undifferentiated sludge.

But I equipped myself with a score from the library - wasn't going to cover a work like this without one - and braced myself to my duty. As I was sitting there waiting for the start, my colleague Lisa of the Iron Tongue came by and expressed surprise to see me there, knowing my take on Mahler. I explained my duty. What she did not say was that she was reviewing it for the Chronicle, though I was hardly surprised to find it there later. She's been writing for them about once a week for a month now, and the more she steps into Kosman's retired shoes the happier I'll be. (It's an important and necessary job, but not one I'd want to undertake myself.)

Anyway, we basically agreed on EPS's approach; the difference was that I was even happier with it. I've heard occasional successful Mahler performances before, but this one took the cake. I wonder if, as with the saying "There are no bad dogs, only bad owners," that there are no bad composers (at least among the big names), only bad conductors. As with the realization I had about the hideous Anton Webern the time I heard him played to sound tender and attractive, I wonder if the reason I normally loathe Mahler so much is because most people insist on playing him so badly.

At least with his earlier work: I find even sympathetic performances of his later symphonies to be impenetrable. There's room for contemplation here.

what, a newspaper?

Several years ago we stopped taking a printed newspaper, a decision which has affected the contents of our recycling bins, to be sure. Several reasons, of which the much greater cost of a print over an online subscription to our local paper is one. (The occasional practice of the delivery people to forget and give us a copy of the local Chinese-language paper instead is another.)

So now I have two online newspaper subscriptions: our local paper and the Washington Post. Originally I got the latter because there was a discount deal for subscribers to our local, but I kept it on because it's a good national paper with useful takes on the news, plus among its columnists is the supremely sarcastic Alexandra Petri. Recent events suggest that the newsroom may be going belly-up - its classical music coverage has already done so - and if the national coverage does so also I'd probably quit, because the strong national beat is what I want an out-of-town paper for.

A number of people on my feed often link to interesting articles in the New York Times which I can't access. I sometimes look those up on the public library computer, but mostly I forget to do so. I don't really want to subscribe to the Times, which does not have a good reputation among people of my political persuasion, past glories of the Pentagon Papers or no. And that and the Wall Street Journal (infamous for its appalling editorial page) and USA Today (only worthwhile as a free handout in hotels, and barely that) are about it for other nationally-oriented dailies in the US.

We got a recommendation for the Philadelphia Inquirer as a trustworthy progressive paper. But I looked at it and it seemed to me that it's primarily a local paper in a sense that the Times and Post are not. And since we have no connection to Philadelphia that's of no use to us. Most of the articles I saw in the national news section had just been picked up from the AP. I was impressed that the paper did send a reporter with Fetterman on his visit to Israel, but he is the senator from Pennsylvania after all, so his doings are of local concern to them.