not out

B. and I have both been ill this week. Fear of coughing, fear of being contagious, and general physical disinclination to do anything account for our absence from tonight's performance of a local production of Noises Off which we'd been looking forward to seeing. We've seen it before, but it's always good.

It also means I'm intending to miss two performances I was planning to see this weekend. After that, nothing till Thursday and I should be better by then.

We did at least manage to struggle up and out to redeem my car from the body shop which nicely fixed the bumper over the past week, during which for both the above reasons and a generally light schedule this week I hardly went anywhere, so I didn't even need a rental car, just borrowing B's for a couple of necessary errands. Like picking up my medication.

Other than that, just following the news with the usual amount of incredulity. The delta smelt and the LA fires is just another example of a regular practice: he picks up a mistaken impression of something from somewhere, probably by misunderstanding or not paying close attention, and from then on for him it's an immutable fact, untouchable by any corrections. Ever encounter that particular pathology elsewhere?

Oscar the grouch

Time for my annual confession of how few Academy-Award nominated movies I've seen.

Aside from the documentary short The Only Girl in the Orchestra, which I actually liked - whoops, how'd that get on here? - only two.

Dune Part Two - dull, duller, dulles.

A Complete Unknown - When Meryl Streep played Florence Foster Jenkins in a movie, despite what sounded like a noble effort she did not come anywhere near capturing the sheer wretchedness of the original's singing. Similarly here. Chalamet has Dylan's nasal tone down pat, but it's actually pleasant to listen to him sing, whereas the original is agonizing. (I had to forbid my college roommate from playing his Dylan records when I was in the apartment. All our other musical tastes were completely sympatico.) Some people seem puzzled by this movie's point. To me, it depicts Dylan as a man determined to do his own thing and not get enlisted in anybody else's causes.

I have little interest in seeing anything else on the list.

better things to do

We did not watch the inauguration. At that moment, we were in fact engaged in a useful activity: turning in my car at the auto body shop for some necessary work. (The front bumper cover had been mangled by some parking space stoppers and a particularly vicious dip.) That was the time they'd offered for check-in, so we were there. B. was with me to drive me home.

I looked at my posting archives and found that during the creature's previous inaugural, we'd also been engaged in a much more useful activity: we were at the veterinarian's, taking Maia in for her annual checkup.

pair of concerts

To Kohl Mansion last Sunday for the Reverón Piano Trio, named for a painter from their native land, Venezuela. Years ago I heard another Latin American chamber ensemble, the Dalí String Quartet, also named after a painter and who also filled half their concert with a Latin American potpourri. The difference was, the Dalí were delightfully wild and crazy guys in their Latin half, but their excursion into standard repertoire, by Mozart, was rather dull and unconvincing.

The Reverón were far more balanced. Their Latin half was taken soberly, though it included a lively chunk of Astor Piazzolla and a piece by Ricardo Lorenz in which the cello lengthily imitates the buzz of a noisy electric ceiling fan. Also in that half, a little waltz by the 19C piano virtuoso Teresa Carreño which sounded like circus music. That's because a lot of Latin American salon music of that era was transcribed for circus organs and that became the associated style. Here, have a listen to "Over the Waves" by Juventino Rosas, which is the piece I most have in mind in making that association. The main theme starts 30 seconds in; tell me you don't recognize it.

But the other half of the Reverón concert was anything but dull or unconvincing. For one thing, it wasn't a standard repertoire piece but the D-minor Trio of Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, Felix's sister. This was the best performance of it I've heard, and it ought to be standard repertoire after this. Wonderfully clear, even compelling, full of individual character.

Anyway, I wrote a review saying all of that.

To Davies on Thursday for the San Francisco Symphony, which may be the last time I get to hear them for a while if the musicians go on strike when their contract extension expires next week. The Symphony Chorus appeared this week, having already gone through their own strike last fall, and were greeted by huge applause by the audience, and even bigger applause greeted the announcement on the supertitles screen that an anonymous donor has given $4 million to endow the Chorus.

What were they singing? Why, Carmina Burana. Led by guest conductor David Robertson, this was a pretty dull run-through if you've heard Carmina as often as I have. Heavy, trudging. Of the soloists, the soprano was OK, but the baritone, though deep-voiced enough, had nowhere near enough power to carry off the part. His drunken abbot was pathetic. The tenor, unusually, appeared on stage only to sing his one solo, the lament of the roasted swan, and then slogged slowly off again, perhaps sad because his character was dead but more likely because he'd been merely adequate in singing about it.

The Chorus was good, though, and even better was the strong and pure sound of the SF Girls Chorus in the children's role, singing (in Latin) words more hair-raising than any children should be approaching, but that's a perennial problem with this work.

Also on the program, yet another newly commissioned piano concerto, this one by John Adams. I liked it better than his clotted and noisy previous piano concerto. This one was light and shining, more like typical Adams. Titled After the Fall, it consists largely of falling phrases, get it?, first provided by soloist Vikingur Ólafsson as the strings shimmer in the background, then by the strings as Ólafsson shimmers in the background. Towards the end the piece is attacked by a lemming-like horde of copies of a quotation from a Bach prelude, which takes over without making the music sound much like Bach. Overall it was OK, though it would probably have gone better with a perkier conductor.

Oh yes, and an opener of Ives's The Unanswered Question, a piece too short and quiet, if dissonant, to contribute to a judgement of the evening.

fire in the hole

The terrible LA fires began in dry brush, which is a characteristic landscape on the edge of LA.

Now, the Silicon Valley area, where I live in Northern California, has a fire in a characteristic Silicon Valley landscape.

It's in a warehouse full of lithium batteries.

It broke out last night, and it can't be extinguished. It'll just have to burn itself out. Fortunately it seems to be contained within the warehouse. But the smoke and fumes are a terrible thing.

It's in a town called Moss Landing on Monterey Bay. Moss Landing is a very small town, which is fortunate as it had to be evacuated, and the area immediately around it is pretty empty.

It's about 50 miles from here, which I hope is far enough. All the same, I would avoid its entire vicinity for a while just to protect one's lungs: Castroville, Marina, Salinas, Watsonville ...

not a fan, I guess

David Lynch died. Looking over his list of films, I find I've seen three of them.

Mulholland Drive I found very weird, in a good way. It was captivating and I've even rewatched it. That's one good one on the list. If you find the plot confusing, it can be completely (well, mostly) cleared up in one sentence, a rare feat.

The Straight Story just annoyed me. When we were on motor home trips in my childhood, whenever we got to a campground, my father would set us up and then go off and find some other dad to have a long chat. The invariability of this became something of a family joke. My mother would sarcastically refer to it as Life Story Time, because those were what the guys mostly swapped. She liked The Straight Story. I said, "Mom, it's nothing but a guy driving across the country having Life Story Time!"

The Elephant Man I don't even remember. Probably drowned out by memories of The Tall Guy.

I never saw Twin Peaks. By the time I heard of it, descriptions made clear it had already sunk so far into Lynchian depths that it would be impossible to follow without having seen the earlier episodes, and it those days there were no streaming services to catch up on it with. But by the time it came out on DVD or VCR or whatever they had then, there were other things to watch that had come along in its wake and I never made the time.

in phosphors

I got an e-mail announcement for a recital by violinist Stella Chen, and just below the headline and the date and time, above the writeup, appeared this quote:

"The outstanding characteristic of her performance was her easy and sure command of the music."—San Francisco Classical Voice

I think I wrote that, I thought. I did write that.

Not the first time I've been quoted this way, but this is why concert promoters are so nice to reviewers; they're hoping for nuggets like that. My honor lies in just writing what I think, and letting the nuggets fall by themselves.

David Lodge

The British writer known for his comic novels died a couple weeks ago - I only just stumbled across the news - a month before his 90th birthday.

It was about 1982, I was in grad school, and one day walking through the portion of the university library stacks devoted to modern British literature, my eye was caught by the title of a novel on the shelf. The British Museum Is Falling Down. Intrigued, I took it down and found a very funny book about a hapless grad student in English, studying books at the British Museum, fretting about his inability to complete his thesis and about the rising number of children he and his wife are having, because they're good Catholics relying on the Rhythm Method.

It was amusing enough, full also of sly references to other modern lit, including passages of comic pastiche, that I took note of the author's name - David Lodge - and looked for more of his novels. The next one I found was his best-known, Changing Places, in which two professors of English exchange positions for a term: one from a thinly-disguised University of Birmingham in England, where Lodge himself taught, and one from an equally thinly-disguised University of California at Berkeley, where Lodge had spent a year and which was my own undergraduate school. The level of humor, subtle but dorky, is shown by the fictionalized Berkeley's English Department being located in a building called Dealer Hall. So what, unless you know that the real Berkeley's English Department is in Wheeler Hall.

I've kept reading Lodge's novels, most of which are actually more serious than those two, because I liked his style and offbeat approach, though I drew the line at the one about Henry James. It was more than obvious that Lodge drew most of his material from his own life, though he used it creatively. The problems of literary study, academic politics, and Catholic hangups about sex were his continuing themes, although gradually as he aged his contemporary novels began being less about sex and more about the plague of Lodge's own later years, deafness. None of these, except to a small extent literary study, have any personal resonance for me: what I liked was the way Lodge wrote about them.

Much of his nonfiction is academic and technical, but he did write some books for the general reader. I particularly liked The Art of Fiction, a collection of newspaper columns in a series exploring aspects of fiction-writing from Lodge's combined practitioner's and critic's viewpoint, with the aim of gently introducing technical concepts such as unreliable narrators and aporia, each column starting with a brief excerpt from a different novelist. A more miscellaneous collection called The Practice of Writing, about his experiences doing it, reveals that he'd wanted to call that first novel I'd read The British Museum Had Lost Its Charm, but he couldn't get permission to quote the Gershwin lyric. I wonder if the book would still have caught my eye as it did if he'd succeeded in using the other title. Without that piece of serendipity, I would probably never have found what became for me a favorite author.

independence emerging through the haze

One on my reading list reports that his wife sent their 6-year-old daughter on an errand to the local shop, about 2 minutes' walk away on a quiet street.

That's a welcome bucking of today's cocooning culture where, if reports can be believed, children are to be so protected from danger that they aren't allowed to develop any independence sometimes even after they're legal adults.

As someone who's never had children, I may have no eggs in this basket, but I am a citizen of a society where I like to be surrounded by competent and experienced people, and I strongly believe that the way to get these people is to start training them in these skills at an early age. The purpose of having a child is to create a functioning adult, and the subject has to learn those functions while still a child.

I can also testify from memory how thrilling, exciting, and morale-boosting it is for a child to be granted responsibility for something. Little things, things that mean nothing to an adult. I must have been 8 or 10 the day my father had to push a stalled car into the driveway. My mother wasn't around so he posted me at the steering wheel. That was exciting.

And when I was of age for it, he taught me to drive - with a manual transmission, a skill I've often been grateful to have. And my mother taught me to cook - a skill I make daily use of.

There were no nearby shops where we lived when I was 6 - we were in a newly-built housing development surrounded by orchards (mostly apricot) on all sides, the only outside access a mile's drive on a bumpy agricultural road with perilous irrigation ditches on both sides - but our development did have a school, 0.4 miles from our house (I just measured it on Google Maps), and I walked there. There was a traffic light, but traffic was not heavy.

The next year we moved out to the countryside. School was a hilly 1.4 miles away. I tried taking the school bus, but mostly I bicycled. On my own I bicycled all around the area, up to 15 miles away. My parents let me do it because even at that age my map-reading skills were exceptional, and I would always be home by dinnertime. (No mobile phones in those days either, don't forget.)

Going off to university at 18 was an awesome thing to do, in my mind, but by then I was well-prepared to do it, both academically and in terms of managing everyday living. Just not socially.

beyond The Last Dangerous Visions

Of the over 100 stories that Harlan Ellison collected for The Last Dangerous Visions, the anthology he keep announcing but never publishing for some 45 years until his death in 2018, over 40 were at some point withdrawn by their authors (or their estates) and published elsewhere.

When a book with that title finally appeared last year, edited (though not by name) by J. Michael Straczynski, it included some 17 of the remaining 50-plus stories. (In a couple cases it's not clear if the story published is the same as the one Harlan had been listing.) JMS promised to return all the remaining stories to the authors (or their estates) along with the rights, for them to do with as they liked.

So John Grayshaw of Amazing Stories decided to check up on their plans with as many of these authors (or their estates) as he could get hold of. He wrote to 56 of them, and here's his results. (h/t F770)

Of those 56, 9 have already been published in English and 2 only in French, which in most cases Grayshaw could have learned from the ISFDB. He did not hear from 34 of the authors (or their estates), leaving 11 that sent him replies. 5 said they have no plans to publish (Grant Carrington, Raylyn Moore, Edgar Pangborn, Joseph F. Pumilia, Bruce Sterling), 2 estates don't have copies of what in both cases were multi-part stories (Russell Bates's sister is looking for them; George Alec Effinger's widow thinks they were lost in a fire long ago, and Grayshaw suggests asking JMS; someone else reports having been reminded of their story by receiving it from JMS); and just 4 say some form of "maybe sometime" (Gordon Eklund, John Jakes, Robert Thom, Lisa Tuttle); no enthusiastic "yes" answers.

Of course there's all those "no reply" entries, plus another half-dozen on various proposed contents lists whom Grayshaw didn't write to, but remember that these are the half of the contributors who didn't withdraw their stories. Either they don't really care or else, like Carrington and possibly some others, they feel what was a dangerous vision half a century ago has lost its savor and best remains buried.

A few more may trickle out, and the latest to have done so on Grayshaw's list is "XYY" by Vonda N. McIntyre, one of the authors whose absence from JMS's contents list has been most regretted by reviewers. It's in a new retrospective anthology of her short work, Little Sisters and Other Stories, and I'll be getting that.

concert review: San Francisco Symphony

In an interview in the program book, guest conductor James Gaffigan says that Prokofiev's Fifth Symphony "is his grandest ... it has everything in it [and] will show the musicians in an incredible light." So this is a conductor who sounds minded not to trip up and let this lyrical yet motoric work go flat and drab, as too often happens.

And he succeeded. It was fast enough, loud enough, energetic enough, tight enough, implacable enough, bristling enough, everything you want it to be. Except that somehow it wasn't exciting enough. It did all this without dazzling the listener. MTT or EPS would have dazzled. Except for the finale, which did kind of get there ... (I'm trying to avoid fire metaphors; right now isn't the time).

Also on the program, Barber's Violin Concerto with Ray Chen, who played with a tone that was constantly variable but always somewhere in the middle of the violin's possibilities - never high or shrieky, never low or growling. I was reminded of the person who said that, politically, "I'm a moderate man - a violently moderate man." A little more violence would have done Chen some good: he wasn't always powerful enough either. Still, a dedicated job.

And Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres) by Missy Mazzoli, a curtain-raiser in typical Mazzoli style, shimmering and drooping draperies of string sound, quietly backed by winds and brass, with clattering percussion thumps (also backed by winds and brass) laid over on top.

This was my first trip up to the City in two months (and my first symphony concert in almost that long, blame the holidays) and it felt a little nostalgically retro to make the trip, the more so as I had to scout out the Richmond district for zones that don't have a two-hour parking restriction on weekday daytimes for the upcoming conference. Found 'em, too.

no longer with us

The bad
Jean-Marie Le Pen, 96, founder of the French far-right party, the National Front. Long since ousted in a party coup by his estranged daughter, who is alive and, well ...

The mixed
Peter Yarrow, 86, beloved folk-singer and unbeloved molester. His conviction on that matter is, I'm told, why Peter Paul & Mary originally broke up, but you won't learn that from my local paper, which deleted any reference to the matter from the obituary.

The good
Perry, 30, the local (Palo Alto) donkey who was the model, both in looks and behavior, for Donkey in Shrek. I've met Perry and can testify that the physical resemblance is precise. Though he didn't talk.

And now with us ...
Here's a detailed map of the new Sáttítla Highlands National Monument in far northern California. (You want the blue line; the green lines are national forest boundaries.) I've been to Lava Beds NM (the brown area at the top) but never within the bounds of the new monument, which has only a few back roads and is very remote.

Also with us
Wind-driven fires in LA. Some of my friends and acquaintances have, or might have, to evacuate, along with thousands of others. Thoughts and prayers. And water, lots of water. Where is Tia Pepa when we need her?

irksome editorial rules

Another editor used to maintain a prohibition against the phrase died suddenly. “All deaths are sudden,” he’d declare solemnly. “One minute you’re alive and the next you’re not.” (Source)

You've never seen anyone dying in the hospital, have you?

ave Vaughan Williams

Vaughan Williams and His World, ed. Byron Adams and Daniel M. Grimley (University of Chicago Press, 2023)

U Chi Press announced a sale on their musicology books, and the only one I really wanted was this collection of essays. I consider VW to be one of ... what? "the greatest"? Too dogmatic. "my favorite"? True, but too weak. "most profound, most moving"? maybe ... composers out there, and I enjoy reading about him, despite his living a placid and uneventful life. (Well, there was the ménage à trois, but let's ignore that.)

The book has a lot of interesting articles, discussing his visits to the US, his time teaching composition at the Royal College of Music (did you know that his students included Anna Russell? the musical parodist? VW complained that her Sullivan pastiches were getting into his head and interfering with his own music), lots on the technique and placing of his film music.

But the best article is the last one, by the conductor (and frequent writer) Leon Botstein. It's a sweeping discussion of the nature, meaning, and evaluation of VW's music. It begins with a fine description of the same argument I've been making about what I call "the hidden city." By the time of VW's death in 1958, music like his was in critical disrepute, while high modernism, especially atonality, had the prestige. His music was thought dull and insignificant. But over the decades since, the cult of modernism has faded, and "the emergence of new music with overt spiritual and expressive ambitions, evident links to popular cultural forms, and free of a lingering distaste for nineteenth-century Romanticism" has also also encouraged a re-evaluation of earlier 20th century music. VW shares these aesthetics, especially that of creating music informed by a deep philosophical basis. Botstein then goes into that basis, attributing this particular form to VW's specific generation, citing his friendships, began as students at Cambridge, with the philosopher G.E. Moore and the historian G.M. Trevelyan. (VW also knew Bertrand Russell there, but he had less impact.) Botstein traces how VW's views on the function and ethics of music, apparent in his compositions, reflected the work of these thinkers (and also that of the historian H.A.L. Fisher, who was VW's brother-in-law). VW himself read history, music not being a topic for an undergraduate major in his time.

Botstein concludes by comparing VW to two slightly younger prose writers who shared a similar aesthetic. Surprise, they're Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. Specifically and most interestingly, he says that Tolkien, despite his deep Catholic faith, showed in his fiction "a resolute, universal, and essentially secular sensibility," with which I agree - Tolkien was deliberately trying not to limit his audience to fellow believers. In this, and in the religious sensibility which nevertheless drapes his works, Tolkien was like VW, who, though not a churchman, was open to the spiritual and moral world attached to religion - he wrote a lot of religious music. But where Tolkien seems to reject the modern (overstated, but it's there), VW sought to integrate it.

Botstein writes a lot about VW's holding beauty in music as a virtue, rather ignoring works like the brutal (but also curiously jolly) Fourth Symphony and the nihilistic Sixth. But that could be part of his engagement with the modern. Anyway, fascinating essay.

news of the weird

1. First off, I want to alert readers to this conference. The topic is "knowledge preservation and dissemination" mostly from a Christian theological perspective. I mentioned to the organizers that library science's principles of preservation and access would be relevant here, and now I find that I'm a presenter at the conference. It's going to be in San Francisco, at the Internet Archive hq, on Jan. 31-Feb. 1, that's less than four weeks away.

2. All right, this one's weird. If you can't access the link, or didn't see it recounted in an unidentified "social media" from which this story appears to be taken, two shoplifters took - apparently at a single gulp - "About $1,200 worth of ribeye, other prime beef cuts and more goods" from a supermarket. It interests me because the market was the one around the block where we do most of our shopping. The story doesn't say how the shoplifters managed it. It does say they were arrested and the goods recovered, and there's a photo of the goods spread over the hood of a police car. I hope the store isn't putting the meat back out on the shelves; who knows how long it's been sitting out there unrefrigerated?

3. Justin Trudeau is resigning. Like Jonah, he's casting himself off the sinking ship in hopes that it will be saved without him. (I realize that Jonah didn't do it voluntarily.) It won't work, i.e. his party will not win the forthcoming election. Canadian prime ministers have done this in similar circumstances before. It didn't work for Trudeau's father in 1984, and it certainly didn't work for the opposition party in 1993, which in the ensuing election won only two seats. All it resulted in was a couple of prime ministers with derisorily short terms (2 1/2 months, 4 months and a week). We're in for another one.

4. Political lesson from the US. When Democrats lose, they accept the result peacefully. When Republicans lose, they riot. Heck, even when Republicans win they sometimes riot. ("Brooks Brothers" riot, Florida, November 2000.)

and where was he born?

John D. Rateliff, an excellent scholar who doesn't usually trip up like this, has again trotted out his favorite bugaboo: objecting to statements in books about Tolkien that say his birth in 1892 was in South Africa. What he was born in, John explains, was Bloemfontein, capital of the Orange Free State, one of the Boer Republics.

This last sentence is true, but the argument is likely to confuse the casual reader. What Tolkien wasn't born in was the Republic of South Africa, which (as the Union of South Africa) wasn't established as a governmental entity until 1910. Before 1900-02, when it was captured by the British, the Orange Free State was indeed an independent republic. After 1910, Bloemfontein was in both the country of South Africa and the Orange Free State, now a province thereof, until the latter was dissolved in 1994.

Saying that Tolkien wasn't born in the Republic of South Africa is like saying that George Washington wasn't born in the United States: both true and misleading, but more misleading than true.

Emphasizing Tolkien's birth as being in a Boer Republic is even more misleading, because Tolkien wasn't a Boer, nor even of long-resident British stock. His parents were both very recent immigrants from Birmingham in central England, and they'd moved to Bloemfontein in pursuance of his father's banking career.

But regardless of whether it is useful to deny that Tolkien was born in the Republic of South Africa, it is not true to deny that Tolkien was born in South Africa. "South Africa," as a geographical expression with a capital S, was in common use long before Tolkien was born. (Example: Compendium of the History and Geography of South Africa (spelled that way in the text) by George McCall Theal, 3rd ed., 1878.)

What anybody hardly ever writes is "south Africa" with a small s, which is John's suggestion. Somewhat more common today is "southern Africa," which more neatly distinguishes the geographic region from the nation, but even that is more often seen with a capital S. People write "West Africa," with a capital W, all the time, even though there's never been a country by that name (unless you count the colonial federations of French West Africa and British West Africa). Hardly anyone writes "west Africa" with a small w.

All this can easily be verified by the Google Ngram Viewer, which is case-sensitive unless you turn that function off.

Tolkien was born in South Africa. It is legitimate and accurate to say that.

This has been another lesson in, Don't correct people if you're not correct yourself.

when to toast Tolkien

Friday was the anniversary of JRR Tolkien's birthday. He was born 1892, so that makes him 133.

The Tolkien Society suggests that everyone raise a glass and make the toast "The Professor" at 9 pm local time. But that doesn't stop them from holding an online gathering with the toast at 9 pm UK time and inviting members worldwide to attend. That makes it 1 pm my time, and I've attended it in the past. The Society chair reads a passage, the toast is made, and then the very large attendance is sorted into breakout groups to chat.

But this year I did something different. I'm on the mailing list for a US-based Inklings discussion group which meets online Fridays, also at 1 pm my time, and which took advantage of the coincidence to celebrate Tolkien's birthday by holding the toast at 2 pm and, it being a much smaller group, giving everybody in it a chance to read a favorite passage of Tolkien. Some prose passages mostly from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings - one person's choice of Bilbo and the spiders inspired someone else to pick Shelob's Lair, despite someone else confessing to finding all the spider passages horribly creepy - and a lot of poems, including "Mythopoeia," part of "The Fall of Arthur," and my choice, an obscure 1920s poem called "The Nameless Land," my favorite Tolkien poem. It's in the collection The Lost Road as well as the new Collected Poems.

Marcel Bülles aka The Tolkienist, a friend of mine in these circles, wants people honoring Tolkien's birthday to promote his e-mail newsletter, "The Roving Ranger." I'm not sure how to get this other than to pay for a subscription to his blog at Steady, which is another service like Substack, because that seems to be why I'm getting it, but there it is. Marcel also has a website where it appears the material from his newsletter will eventually end up. Anyway, it has lots of material interesting and enticing to other Tolkienists, which is why I signed up.

end of the holidays

Thursday was the end of the holiday season in our house. I dug out the last congealed fragments of wax from the Hanukkah menorah and put it away. B. took down the ornaments from our artificial Christmas tree, and I took the tree apart and packed it away. Then I moved the old rocking chair back into its position in the living room, and spread out the sheepskin and other pieces of fabric that Maia likes to sit on to their accustomed places, which should make for a slightly less disgruntled cat.

The first business day of the year is also when I traditionally take my car in for its annual servicing, which costs much money and takes several hours (spent reading and checking email on my ipad) but revealed nothing urgently bad. It also made it easy to stop in on the way home at the supermarket nearby which has the best fresh crab cakes, so that was dinner along with some sauteed asparagus.

what the Heinlein?

Suddenly, on this first day of 2025, I am finding allusions in my reading to Robert A. Heinlein.

One is this anecdote from Mark Evanier, in which Mark tells of the time in 1984 that he found himself assigned at a comics convention to moderate a panel on Heinlein. Only problem was that Mark had never read any Heinlein, and then, it turned out, neither had any of the panelists, who'd been assigned as blithely as he had, nor any of the audience, who were there mostly out of curiosity as to who this Heinlein was.
And that, I guess, shows a difference between comics conventions and science-fiction conventions. Today would be different, but in 1984 you could have staffed a pretty good and discursive, probably even contentious, panel on Heinlein at an SF con by just grabbing half a dozen random people from the hallway. Because even if they didn't know his work well, they'd have had opinions.

The other is Kevin Drum's 20 favorite books of all time, which includes Time Enough for Love (or, as I like to call it, Time for Enough Love). Oh, is it really? Not just your favorite Heinlein - personally I'd only feel easy about anyone's choice for that honor if it was published before about 1960 - but one of your favorite books of all time? Many of the other choices left me equally gobsmacked - Stephen R. Donaldson, oh god - and all I can say is, people sure are different.