books, some political

107 Days, Kamala Harris (Simon & Schuster, 2025)
You'd think a book like this would be a chance to wax reflective on what it's like to run for president, particularly under such unusual circumstances. But it turns out that running for president allows no time to be reflective, so this is mostly an account of Things Happening.
What mostly surprised me is how unlike this book is to many descriptions of it. No, Kamala doesn't blame everybody but herself. She castigates herself, not for major decisions, but for opening her mouth and saying the wrong thing. She doesn't blame Biden for it all either, though she offers a few real criticisms. Mostly she blames his staff. (They'd say she was a lousy veep. She'd reply, nobody could be a good veep with so little institutional support.) One thing is sure, this is not a 2028 campaign tract. Too many bridges being burned behind her.

Coming Up Short: A Memoir of My America, Robert B. Reich (Knopf, 2025)
Reich says that when trying to persuade politicians, he's often lost his audience by going on too long about rising inequality and the fall of the working and middle classes, and he proves that in this book. If he said it once, it would be punchy. After seven or eight times of Reich making the same points, even the sympathetic reader wearies.
It's roughly framed around an account of his life, but that's just the frame and the anecdotes; the bulk is endless repetitions of the same lecture on economics. The parts about his service in the Clinton administration are just copied from his earlier and more readable book, Locked in the Cabinet.

Our Country: The Shaping of America from Roosevelt to Reagan, Michael Barone (Free Press, 1990)
Political history of the US, heavily emphasizing federal electoral politics, from 1930 to the day of the 1988 election. Divided into two parts. Before 1968, it's a sparkling and intelligent history, focused on the electoral details that I want to read about, just what you'd expect from the founding editor of The Almanac of American Politics.
But starting in 1968, two bad things happen to this book. First, that was about the time that polls became ubiquitous, so the prose is deluged with polling result numbers, instead of stepping back and explaining what the numbers tell us. Second, this appears to be the time that Barone's personal memories begin, so after previously dealing out praise and criticism impartially, he begins to be partisan, and his partisanship is conservative. He keeps slamming the left in ways showing he doesn't understand their points, and he keeps telling us that Nixon ended the Vietnam War, which he did not.

Small Fry, Lisa Brennan-Jobs (Grove Press, 2018)
Memoir of her childhood by Steve Jobs' out-of-wedlock daughter, the one he either did or didn't name the Lisa computer for, depending on when you asked him. He also both did and didn't acknowledge her existence as his daughter, so Lisa spends most of the book yearning for an attachment that she's never quite sure she can get, and dealing with his odd habits, and the weird phenomenon of his having an effectively unlimited fortune. Meanwhile she also has to deal with her equally peculiar mother and a parade of miscellaneous stepfather figures.
This book is so long and detailed it's hard to get a sense that it's going anywhere, except that Lisa gradually gets a bit older. I also have to wonder: does she really remember all this stuff? In this much detail? How much non-fiction is this book, really?

so do all opera reviews

Four years ago, I attended the last performance of San Francisco Opera's production of Cosi fan tutte, having been persuaded by a review by Lisa of the Iron Tongue. Yesterday, I attended the last performance of Opera San José's production of Cosi fan tutte, having been persuaded by a review by Lisa of the Iron Tongue.

I found it a less ideally superb performance than San Francisco's, though all the ingredients were good. Certainly there was some excellent singing on display. Soprano Emily Michiko Jensen as Fiordiligi (she's going on to play the title role in Madame Butterfly in their next production) shone the brightest with some powerhouse arias. But I like duets and ensemble numbers best in opera, and for me the highlight of the entire piece was the duet in which Guglielmo (baritone Ricardo José Rivera) wooed Dorabella (mezzo Joanne Evans) in Act 2. Their low voices blended perfectly together. Rivera has an impressively powerful voice, stronger and deeper even than that of Dale Travis as Don Alfonso. Were it not for Travis's age, I'd have suggested they exchange roles.

Nicole Koh as Despina was not only a good physical comedian, she was able to express comedy in her singing voice as well. That leaves Jonghyun Park, a good clear tenor, as Ferrando. Sets and costumes were basic 18C; the men's disguises were more than a little thin. Assistant conductor Noah Lindquist led this performance.

The gimmick of this production was having the audience vote, online during intermission, on how the characters would pair off at the end. In this performance they went with their original partners, which is what the text says; but I wonder how it would have been handled had they all split up or the men had gone off together, which were two of the other options. Maybe it would have looked like the end of a performance of Measure for Measure I once saw, in which Isabella spurns the Duke's hand and walks offstage. But that would have been a pretty sour ending for this production of Cosi, whose director said he was seeking a return to the comedy at the end.

concerts review

Many years ago, San Francisco Performances put on a series of morning concerts which I attended. The Alexander String Quartet would play one or two of Shostakovich's string quartets (or sometimes, with guests, another of his chamber works), preceded by a lecture on (theoretically) that part of Shostakovich's career and those particular works, by music historian Robert Greenberg. It took three years to go through the entirety of the subject, but I went to them all and increased my familiarity with the repertoire.

But though this successful series was followed by many more with the same personnel on other composers, I didn't go to any more. After three years, I'd had enough of Greenberg's mannered, detail-clogged, and over-interpretive lecturing style, and I wasn't fond enough of the Alexander Quartet to overcome this.

But now things have changed. The Alexanders have hung up their bows, and the Esmé Quartet, of which I'm very fond indeed, is replacing them. This year's series is four concerts - that's not too many - on the major quartets (and quintet) of Schubert's, and yesterday was the first. They're not going in chronological order: this week's piece was the "Death and the Maiden" Quartet. Greenberg's lecture was as mannered and detail-clogged as ever, but at least the interpretation made sense. This work, he said, is haunted by death, which is why Schubert quoted from his song on the subject - not to recycle material (Schubert hardly needed to do that) but to convey meaning. But, Greenberg said, the finale is not a dance of death as many claim, but offers consolation and acceptance, as does Death in the last verse of the song.

The Esmé sat on stage during all of this, playing excerpts of the quartet for illustrative points. Then, after intermission, they played the whole work. It was not as violently intense as some do it, but this meant the lighter third and fourth movements were as satisfactory as the larger, darker first two. The sound was crisp and slightly metallic. The players added expression with pauses and dips in intensity. It was gratifying to hear.

I occupied mid-day with a quest I may tell you about later, and then landed in Walnut Creek for the evening with the season's first concert by the California Symphony. This was a program of pops classics, a framing confirmed by conductor Donato Cabrera's increasing tendency to yammer from the podium. Gershwin's An American in Paris had colorful enough tone color, but the tenor of the piece was dull after SFS's magnificent show last week. To be fair, this is how the work usually sounds to me. Ravel's Boléro worked better, and his orchestration of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition was marred only by the tendency of some of the wind soloists to swallow their phrases.

From Scott Fogelsong's pre-concert lecture I learned something about the Ravel Pictures I hadn't known. The orchestration was commissioned by Boston Symphony music director Serge Koussevitsky, who kept exclusive performing rights for his lifetime, despite clamors by others to play it. Which explains something I'd wondered: why there are so many other orchestrations of Pictures, and why most of them sound just like Ravel's.

light bulbs

I'm trying to catch up with light bulbs. Once there were incandescent bulbs, which looked like this:

Then we were all encouraged to abandon them and take up LED bulbs, which initially looked sort of like this:

This took some getting used to, but I did.
But then I was just in the hardware store looking, for the first time in a while, for new bulbs, and found that now the LED bulbs are the same shape as the old incandescent bulbs, just with different insides. They look rather like this:

These are the right ones, right? I'm just trying to catch up here.

multitasking

1) placing this week's pickup grocery order on the store's website

and

2) listening to a lecture on Zoom sponsored by the local public library.

The lecture is by a comp sci prof named Dr. Shaolei Ren, and is on the environmental impacts of AI servers. Which appear to be gargantuan. So much so that Dr. Ren had to keep saying he's not anti-AI, he just thinks we should have a clear-eyed view of their impact. So: gobbling up more water than the rest of the county combined, and spewing carcinogenic air pollutants across borders. Be particularly careful if you're downwind of Loudoun County, Virginia, which seems to be the AI server capital of the country. Downwind of it is Montgomery County, Maryland.

show review

Laura Benanti: Nobody Cares, Berkeley Rep

Hour-long one-woman show, sort of, by the musical theater star and Melania Trump impersonator. Mostly spoken, but with songs inserted: not greatest hits, but purpose-written songs expanding on what she's been talking about, co-written with her musical director and pianist Todd Almond, accompanied also by bass and drum kit.

It's one of those wryly amusing sample of life things. Her theme is that she's overly anxious to please people (including us, the audience), going back to her earliest days in the theater, where she specialized in being an ingenue. (Definition by examples: "Disney princesses, Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde, Timothée Chalamet.") Also why, since premiering at 18, she's never been for any length of time without a boyfriend or husband, some of whom sound pretty awful in her telling. (Song about, Are there any good men out there?) She's been married three times, which she seems to consider a blot on her escutcheon. So did the clerk at the marriage license bureau, who - in an amusing story Benanti tells - wasn't sure whether the fiancé at her third marriage knew that she'd been married twice before.

Anyway, her third husband, whom she's been married to for ten years now (she's 45), seems to be the satisfactory one, and they have two little girls, so she segues into talking about motherhood, covering everything from overcoming your taught aversion to bottle-feeding when it turns out you can't breastfeed (the baby thought the bottle was great, but not the strangers who would see it and come up and say, "You should try breastfeeding") to answering smart-alec remarks from precocious kindergarteners. (Song on the theme "Mama's a liar" - she's trying to reassure her children and hide how broken the world is.)

Last topic, perimenopause. Oh boy. After which, she says, you become a crone and turn invisible. (As in, people don't notice that you're there.) "Well," she says, "I refuse to be invisible."

I saw Benanti play Liza in My Fair Lady at Lincoln Center in NYC six years ago, and I've seen her talk about some of these things in online concerts. So I was a good candidate for this and enjoyed it.

all the first days at once

It's Erev Rosh Hashanah (for the year 5786 A.M.), the equinox and thus the beginning of autumn in the northern hemisphere, and Bilbo's and Frodo's birthdays, all on the same day. What bliss!

Mitfords in line

Do Admit! The Mitford Sisters and Me by Mimi Pond (Drawn & Quarterly, 2025)

I've been curious about the Mitfords since my eye was caught by a title on a bookstore display table one day nearly 50 years ago: Poison Penmanship. It was a collection of Jessica's muckraking magazine articles. I bought it. She became a favorite author of mine, and it was from reading her memoirs that I learned that she was called Decca and had five equally colorful but sometimes more alarming sisters.

There have been a number of biographies, individual and joint, but I haven't found the ones I've read particularly compelling. This one, though, was fascinating as well as zippy. I'm not sure what to call the kind of book this is. It looks like a graphic novel, except it's non-fiction. The art is sometimes a little sketchy - I'm not sure I recognize the sisters, much of the time - and it can get very confusing what order to read a page's various captions in.

But it's very well told, going through the entire lives, jumping from one sister to another and concentrating on what they did together, with digressions in the form of visits to the author's own bleak suburban childhood for contrast or comparison, and sidebar-like introduction to other characters or events (treating their only brother that way). It tends to skip over Pam, the least colorful sister, in her earlier years, and it gets overall sketchy near the end, telling what happened without the rich array of anecdotes that enliven the earlier years.

But it tells lots of good stories, only some of which (mostly those involving Decca) I already knew, and brings them to added life with the illustrations. And the jumping-around storytelling style is impressively coherent.

There aren't many factual errors; I only counted a couple. The only one of any significance was the statement that Decca and her husband Esmond met Washington Post publisher Eugene Meyer through one of the letters of introduction they carried when they came to the US. They did carry a batch of such letters, but they got to know Meyer through his daughter Kay, whom they'd met at a party and hit it off with immediately. She is mentioned later, where it's noted that she's Katharine Graham, later the famous publisher of the Post herself, but not that she and Decca remained lifelong friends.

Pond is emphatically sympathetic to Decca's time in the Communist Party - they were giving a hoot about social justice when hardly anyone else was - and she tries to be understanding about the eccentricities of the Mitford parents, but her treatment of sisters Diana who became a fascist and Unity who became an outright Nazi and a Hitler groupie is pretty deadpan. This is what they did; comment would be superfluous. And I learned a lot I hadn't known about the personal lives of the remaining sisters, Nancy and Debo.

Very informative, very entertaining, and despite its length a very fast read. Probably the best book-length introduction to the batch of them.

concert review: Palo Alto Philharmonic

I wanted to review something for the Daily Journal for September, especially because I skipped out on August. Not that there's much going on classically in either month, and the one thing going on in the DJ's coverage area that I could get to was the Palo Alto Philharmonic's Baroque concert, so that's what I wrote about.

I don't often cover early music (defined as pre-1750), because there's not a lot of interpretive "give" in it and there may be difficulty finding anything much to say. This concert left me with two positive impressions, one performer-oriented and the other in repertoire. First, that the bassoonist (Gail Selburn) playing Vivaldi's RV 497 bassoon concerto (I have to specify the catalog number because there are 39 Vivaldi bassoon concertos) was spectacularly good - I wish I could say the same for the violinist who played most of the concert's other solos; second, I enjoyed the almost Nymanesque slow march in a quartet by Johann Friedrich Fasch. I located a YouTube performance of this piece out of the thicket of crabbed catalog numbers for minor composers, and here it is cued up to that movement. Continuo here is on bassoon and harpsichord. These guys are nowhere near as good as the performers I heard, but this may give an idea.

concert review: San Francisco Symphony

I did it. Rising from my bed of recuperation, I ventured up to the City for my first SFS concert of The Season Without A Music Director. This required two forms of public transit as well as a lot of driving, and my first eating out since early August. The meal was a little iffy - even ordering a smaller than previously customary dinner, I still overestimated how much I'd be able to eat - but everything else went OK.

And I got to hear a stunningly effective concert under guest conductor James Gaffigan. At least so far in its travails, SFS hasn't lost any of its MTT-given snazz. That was on vivid display in this program, four pieces of sophisticated 20C urban Americana.

The excitement kicked off with a gratifyingly tight and exciting performance of Gershwin's Concerto in F. Soloist Hélène Grimaud, dressed in sparkles, dazzled visually as well as audibly. I've called her the Argerich of her generation, and she demonstrated that pizazz. The outer movements were big and brash, which is surely how the composer wanted it. Gaffigan was clearly fully into it on the podium. But even more pleasing was the Adagio, which simply burst with sardonic New York color. The players knew just how jazzy they needed to be. At the end of the work, Gaffigan's first acknowledgment was to rush to the back of the stage to shake hands with the principal trumpet.

Gershwin's An American in Paris, which I've never much liked, was almost as satisfying, shining equally brightly with the same colorful sass, and again Gaffigan shook hands with the trumpeter. Duke Ellington's Harlem has a different style but worked to the same effect with even more jazz stylings, as much as was called for.

I only wish these had preceded instead of followed the one new and unfamiliar (to me) piece on the program, Carlos Simon's The Block, so I could have triangulated and better appreciated the style. As it was, the piece sounded like the answer to the question, What if the composer John Adams had been an urban ethnic?

The one odd clang to the concert came on noting from the program book previous-performances listing that SFS has already played each of these works within the last four years. Considering that, as others have noted, each of the works on the opening showcase concert last week had been played within the previous one year, the programming of last night's concert looks less bold and thematic and more timid and conservative. I think we're in for a lot of that this year.

thought in the chair

I understand that the dentist needs to drill around in my tooth for two hours, but why do I have to be there when it happens? If there were such a thing as an out-of-body experience, now would be the time for it.

musical chairs

I hadn't seen any specific discussion of the Cabinet reshuffle two weeks ago in the UK, so I looked up the highlights. It was unusually incestuous. Three of the principal cabinet ministers simply exchanged places. The former foreign secretary is now the justice secretary. The former justice secretary is now the home secretary. And the former home secretary is now the foreign secretary.

And this after only 14 months in office! What will they do next? Oh, yeah, host Trump.

Robert Redford

The once famously handsome, later famously rugged, actor and director died today (today!?) at 89.

I'm kind of surprised, on checking his filmography, to find that I've only seen nine films he acted in, because I always thought I followed him pretty closely. It was seeing him in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which was pretty much his breakout role, that was responsible for my seeking out two films he made a couple years later.

The Candidate, sill a preserved image of how US political campaigns actually worked in that period, is a fine portrait of their soul-sucking quality. Redford plays a young lawyer who embarks on a quixotic campaign determined to speak the truth as he sees it. And when that refreshing honesty brings him unexpectedly wide support, his managers force him into becoming a bland packaged product mouthing platitudes, out of fear of offending anybody and losing that support. This is pretty much what happened to the John Anderson presidential campaign eight years later, so it's penetratingly observant.

The Hot Rock is a crime caper comedy about a gang of hapless crooks led by Redford and George Segal (also new to me at that point). It became significant in my life when I read the novel it was based on, which made me into a lifelong fan of the novel's author, Donald E. Westlake.

Then came The Sting and All the President's Men, both classics of their kind, and in more recent years A Walk in the Woods and The Old Man and the Gun. But the only one of Redford's weepy romantic films I've seen is Out of Africa, encouraged by a friend who was a big Isak Dinesen fan.

In all of these, Redford was a solid presence, with a tendency that increased over the years to be quietly reactive rather than the active presence of his earlier years. Redford's character in The Sting is so much a carefree ne'er-do-well that his motivation, to seek revenge for a friend's death, is almost buried. You wouldn't see Redford play a role that way in later years.

went to a book discussion

Today was the quarterly meeting of our mythopoeic book discussion group. Most of us were there in person. One attendee came in by zoom from 2000 miles away. Another came in person from 2000 miles away. She was visiting.

Our topic was Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones. I reported something I found it has in common with The Lord of the Rings, which is: that the movie is very pretty, but the book is far better. I would peg it as my third favorite of all DWJ novels, #2 being Archer's Goon and #1 Fire and Hemlock. One thing we liked about it is that the lead character is a very old lady, which is rather unusual, even though she's not really a very old lady but is under a spell. One thing we did not like about the movie is that it robs Sophie, for that is her name, of her agency, which is one reason why it's so boring but the book isn't.

One other thing making the book interesting that's absent from the movie is the mind-expanding glimpse of what is at least putatively our world from the viewpoint of an alternative fantasy world.

In the course of more general discussion about books we've read lately, I came across a new wrinkle in pronunciation. I'm used to Stephen Colbert pronouncing Gollum (gaul-um) as if it were golem (go-lem). But here somebody was pronouncing golem as if it were Gollum. The two words have of course nothing to do with each other. Gollum is an intensely human (for a sufficient definition of human), intensely tragic figure who has fallen into a personal hell through his own greed, and is trying to get out but never quite succeeds. A golem is a mindless robotic servant creature made of clay. They're nothing alike. Attempts to find a connection via folk etymology, which is postulating sources by what a word happens to sound like to the hearer, are an inane form of literary analysis.

I opined that some movie which I'm not going to name was passingly enjoyable to watch, but the supernatural part of the plot did not hang together. Others said that people like it that way. I had my doubts to this, but instead merely said that "I consider a dislike of incoherent and inconsistent magic systems to be a feature, not a bug."

went to a concert

I went out to a concert on Saturday evening. It was a local community orchestra doing Baroque pieces with a chamber ensemble, and I'll have more to say about that after my review of it is published in the Daily Journal next week.

Here I wish to point out that this is the first time I've left home for anything other than a grocery etc. run or a medical appointment in over a month, since August 10. That it's slow season for concerts isn't the reason for this, it just made it easier. The reason is the covid I contracted on the 10th, which showed up a couple days later. The infection was over in less than two weeks, but the effects on my general energy and on respiratory and food-ingesting systems have been lasting.

The difficulties with the last of these mean I'm not yet ready to approach dining in a restaurant. I can't eat much food and I need much more water than a restaurant is likely to serve. So, very unusually, I ate a quick dinner at home (B. was out at mass) before going to the concert, which fortunately was local. I forgot that there isn't a light at Alma and Channing, but otherwise I remembered how to get where I was going.

I found the concert-going experience a bit stressful, though the music was good. I may be ready to do this again in another couple of weeks, which is when the concert season really gets going.

does this exist?

Here's something I could use: small spray bottles of various colors of edible food coloring. I'd stick the nozzle in a bottle of pills and coat all the pills inside. The coating would need to not come off when I handled the pills.

That way, when I sort out my pills each week for my timed dispensers, I'd be able to tell the difference between all the tiny round white pills. Some of these pills used to be colored, but most of them are white now. Sometimes I need to not take a specific pill on a specific day for a specific reason, and I need to be able to identify it.

Also in the potential usefulness department, and described in a newspaper article, an A.I. that specializes in writing appeals letters for health insurance denials. I belong to an all-encompassing HMO, so anything ordered for me is automatically covered, for which I hope I am grateful enough, but I wonder if something of that general kind would have been useful when I needed to file an appeal of a flat unexplained statement that my pandemic unemployment relief had been ruled ineligible, they didn't say why. I'd sent in my 1099 for the pre-pandemic year to prove I'd been employed, which is what they'd wanted me to demonstrate, but that was judged insufficient, again without saying why. After much searching, I found a lawyer who suggested that my tax return, bank statements, payment stubs (which I still had) and a boilerplate affidavit from my employer (who was happy to provide it) would help, and they did. But I needed someone to advise me on that.

vicarious travel

The Not-Quite States of America, Doug Mack (Norton, 2017)

I've visited all 50 of the U.S. states. So, I would think, has Doug Mack. I don't think he says so specifically, but he prides himself on his knowledge of the states.

But I've never been to any non-state territory of the U.S. except the contiguous one, the District of Columbia. Neither had Doug Mack when the other five inhabited territories came to his attention when they showed up as appendices to the state quarters series.

So he decided to visit all of them. The two in the Caribbean - Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands - are common tourist destinations, but for two in the Pacific - Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands - the tourists are mostly Japanese, and hardly anyone visits American Samoa except expatriates and government bureaucrats on business.

This book is Mack's account of going to all these places. (He also visits the Marshall Islands, which is an "associated state" - he explains what that means - near the Northern Marianas.)

He has a colorful touristy time, and gets into friendly conversations with the locals of a kind that introverted me would not be able to handle. It gives the reader a good idea of what it would be like to go to these places, which is good because I have no intention of doing so myself.

But Mack has more of an agenda than that. These places all have strange and uncomfortable histories as U.S. colonial possessions, and even today are poised awkwardly between being parts of the U.S. and being foreign, where U.S. laws and rights don't apply. He goes into some detail on the history of this and what it means, with lots of references to the Spanish-American War and the Insular Cases, but the most striking example of this comes when he tells you that if you fly to the Virgin Islands from the mainland U.S. there's no customs station, you can just walk off the plane and out to the street, but when you come back you have to show your passport. I hope that airlines inform customers of this when they buy tickets.

He also asks the inhabitants whether they consider themself U.S.-Americans or people of their own territory. The usual answer is, "Both!" The number of U.S.-based chains he finds in places like Guam impresses him, as does the time he goes to what he expects will be a genuine native restaurant in American Samoa and discovers that, like a lot of Samoans, the chef has lived in L.A. and has really taken to Tex-Mex cuisine. So he eats tacos in Samoa. It's both.

chicken for dinner

Last week's grocery order came, not with the prepackaged boneless chicken thighs I'd ordered, but with some wrapped up from the meat counter. This made me worried that they wouldn't last as long, so I hastened to use the pound-and-a-half of them in the next two evening's dinners. I fetched two favorite recipes from my little homebrewed cookbook.

First was lemon chicken, which is made by pan-frying whole boneless thighs that have been coated in flour, and then taking the chicken out of the pan and making the sauce in the leftover juices. The recipe says to prepare the chicken by pounding it thin, so it will cook all the way through, as there's a limit for how long you can cook it in the pan before the surface begins to burn. But I can't be bothered with the pounding (experience having shown I can't do it very well), so I found a shortcut: take the cooked chicken, before putting it back in the pan with the sauce, and zap it in the microwave for 30 seconds.

Then one of my two recipes for Chinese cashew chicken, both of which B. likes better than most of the cashew chicken dishes we've had as takeout from local Chinese restaurants. (Actually there's one she likes, but it's from Menlo Park, which is 20 miles away so opportunity to come home from there with dinner is limited.) This requires cutting the meat up in smaller chunks, which is something of a bear of a task but worth it for the results. This one has a sauce including lots of garlic and hoisin sauce as well as soy sauce and chicken broth, which starts out liquid and then sets in place. For cashews, I grab a handful from a can of halves and pieces, which work better in recipes than whole cashews.

For this one, the veggies can be included in the main dish. I'd brought a couple packages of jollof rice home from the newage grocery in Ashland, and made congee* out of it, which owing to the size of the package made for a huge result, especially as I'd mixed a pound of cooked ground turkey into it, a trick I'd borrowed from the recipe for Cajun rice dressing (aka "dirty rice"). Anyway, the point of mentioning this is that the leftovers are making a great side dish for dinners that need rice. Scoop some into a cereal bowl and zap it for a minute and a half.

*Congee is made by taking a rice recipe and doubling both the amount of water and the cooking time. The result is not that different from a regular rice dish, but it has half the carbs.

concert review: Cambrian Symphony

I didn't attend this concert, even though it was local. Not in person, anyway. My slowly recuperating health is still not up to such a venture. But this community orchestra, which I've heard before, had such a tempting pops-oriented program that I signed up for the livestream version and took it in that way, just as I'd done for Banff.

It was all dance music: a suite from Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, parts of which I like and parts of which I could do without; and three works of Latin American origin: the two most standard Mexican pops-classical numbers, Moncayo's Huapango and Márquez's Danzón No. 2, and a suite of Three Latin American Dances by Gabriela Lena Frank. This was more a set of tone poems than the others' dance hall numbers.

Thomas Alexander conducted, and for an encore they played an encore: the last couple minutes of Huapango over again.

There were, as you'd expect of a community orchestra playing difficult music, some weak and rough spots here and there, but they entirely avoided playing the Mexican pieces with a flat Anglo accent, a horror I've actually heard once or twice.

What I could have really done without was the municipal puffery talks from orchestra members in between every two pieces. It wasn't so much that they were begging for contributions, though there was a bit of that, it was more that they wanted to assure the listeners what a great orchestra they are, and how educational they're being by inviting local high school students to play along with them, to give them exposure to real "high level" (that's the term they used) playing.

There's high level and there's high level - this orchestra manages coherent playing with artistic interpretation, but next to a professional orchestra, there's no comparison. And judging by the last time I heard a community orchestra with high school students attached, and then they left and I could hear the orchestra without them, the orchestra didn't build them up, they dragged it down.

This was just fun to hear the music.

they know the answer

Have you seen any of those bits on late-night comedy shows where they send a crew out on to the street and ask passersby some simple question (like, "can you point to and name any country on this boundary-outline map of the world?") and compile clips of people completely failing at it?

Here's such a video in which, gratifyingly, most of them get it right. Query is to fill in the missing word in various famous quotations from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Not from a comedy show, but filmed at and by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in the lobby of the theater holding this year's production of same (which I saw), which might be considered a giveaway.

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

The noted fantasy and horror writer died on Sunday.

I'd read some of her works. Not so much the Saint-Germain chronicles, which were her best known and most voluminous work, but a few other things. I particularly got a kick out of a light fantasy called A Baroque Fable, which I have an autographed copy of here: the story contains songs, and there's something at least unusual, probably unique among fantasy novels at the end of the book: printed music of the tunes of those songs, composed by the author herself.

For music, especially opera, was an abiding interest in Quinn's life. Indeed, the idea for the Count Saint-Germain came from a real man of unknown origin using that name who floated around the court of Louis XV. He was a musician and composer, making him of interest to Quinn. Rumors of extended lifespans followed him around, and Quinn's idea was, what if he were an immortal vampire? and a series of novels depicting him as such and placing him in a variety of settings followed.

But for me, Quinn Yarbro was primarily a person whom I knew. She was part of the circle of sf people I joined when I went to UC Berkeley as a student in the '70s. I was part of "the gang from the late, lamented Magic Cellar" to whom A Baroque Fable is dedicated, and I often saw and chatted with her there while the Cellar lasted. It was there, too, that she brought the first printed copies of Hotel Transylvania, the first Saint-Germain book. I also was invited to a small, invitational social group that met at the home of Quinn and her then-husband Don Simpson, a tinkerer, inventor, and artist of vast imagination, who is still with us today. We talked sometimes of music, often lots of other things, and it was always interesting.

So I knew Quinn fairly well in a casual acquaintance way for some time, and we continued to greet each other as friends in later years. I last saw her at the San Jose Worldcon in 2018, where she was one of the Guests of Honor. I ran into her at an off-campus party at the nearby home of mutual friends, and we had one last friendly and agreeable conversation. I'll miss her fierce intelligence and inquisitive mind.