o to be a blogger

1. In writing my piece yesterday on Elon Musk misinterpreting The Lord of the Rings as a tale of the heroism of "hard men" like Tommy Robinson, I left one point out. If the Dúnedain of Arnor and Gondor don't actually qualify as "hard men" by Musk's standards, you know who does? The ruffians that Sarumen sent to the Shire. Those were as hard as you could want, and rather reminiscent of Tommy Robinson. But you wouldn't want them. Let's not take Musk's reading, shall we?

2.Well, the election results are encouraging. I don't have much to do with New York City, but the place is a large spectacle difficult to ignore, and I hope that incoming mayor Zohran Mamdani has better luck with his sweeping reforming agenda than have previous reforming NYC mayors like, say, John Lindsay. Judging from his recent interview on the Daily Show, Mamdani's plan for overcoming institutional barriers is to try really, really hard.

According to the Washington Post, Mamdani "says Israel should not exist as a Jewish state." No further elaboration on what he means by that. That's disturbing, and crosses a line that should not be crossed, but it's not in keeping with the judiciously balanced criticism I've otherwise heard from him. So I'm not sure whether to believe it, or indeed what it means as to the reliability of the Post as a source.

In other mayoral news, people are still trying to make excuses for Andrew Cuomo. "Cuomo had baggage, to be sure, but he was a “single Italian male” from a different era." I don't know what being Italian has to do with this, but don't give us that "different era" nonsense. Cuomo was born in 1957 and reached maturity in the 1970s, as did I. That was the heyday of second-wave feminism, and I and my male friends were steeped in that rhetoric. Our implementation was flawed and imperfect, to be sure, but we were taught to be respectful of women and certainly not to sexually harass our co-workers and employees. Because that would be wrong.

3. Joshua Kosman writes about a play depicting a thinly-disguised Fleetwood Mac creating Rumours, and thinks the only explanation for the thing's appeal is its depiction of what's involved in making a rock record. That might intrigue me. Despite watching much of the Beatles' Let It Be footage (and being stunningly bored by most of it), I know little of the creativity involved in this process, except that it's very different from how classical musicians work. I might like to know more.

4. Pretty much the last word on Dick Cheney.

5. I haven't had time to listen to all of this yet. It's a 90-minute oral history interview with Warfield M. Firor. He was a professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins Medical School, and I presume the interview is mostly about that (the beginning describes his own medical school days), but I wonder if it gets into his distinctive hobby. In the post-WW2 years when rationing was tight in the UK, Dr. Firor would send - purely as spontaneous gifts - canned hams to C.S. Lewis, who was apparently one of his favorite authors. Lewis would have these prepared by his college chef and served to his friends at invitational suppers, and rendered himself nearly speechless trying to write letters of thanks for this largess. Is there anything about this story from Dr. Firor's point of view?

Muskery

There have been other articles published, analyzing Elon Musk's peculiar misreading of The Lord of the Rings, but I'd like to unpack it a little further.

Musk wrote, "When Tolkien wrote about the hobbits, he was referring to the gentlefolk of the English shires, who don’t realize the horrors that take place far away. They were able to live their lives in peace and tranquility, but only because they were protected by the hard men of Gondor. ... It is time for the English to ally with the hard men, like Tommy Robinson, and fight for their survival or they shall surely all perish." And, in the part I omitted, he referred to a post by Robinson describing "the Afghan attacking the public" in an incident in England, with an anti-immigrant conclusion.

Andrew O'Hehir, in an article I linked to above, describes this as "an especially idiotic misreading of Lord of the Rings as a right-wing warmonger fable," and it is, but it's actually a distorted mirror-reflection of the situation Tolkien describes.

First off, one must clarify that Tolkien intended absolutely no contemporary geopolitical reading whatever, particularly one only occurring after he wrote the book (he finished a draft in 1948, soon after World War II), and that looking for one is extremely perilous. Some early readers assumed a parallel to the war, and Tolkien was at pains to point out, in the foreword to the second edition, that the stories were entirely different. "If [the real war] had inspired or directed the development of the legend, then certainly the Ring would have been seized and used against Sauron" and Saruman would, like the USSR getting the Bomb, would have made his own Ring and challenged the West. "In that conflict both sides would have held hobbits in hatred and contempt: they would not long have survived even as slaves."

Those inclined towards Muskery should look hard at that last sentence. His claim to save hobbits looks more like it will trample them.

As part of the same point, the hobbits aren't "the gentlefolk of the English shires." True enough that Tolkien modeled hobbit society on the English countryfolk of his pre-WW1 youth, but that's just a model, not a parallel, and even if you can force through a parallel to the WW2 situation, that has absolutely no applicability to the period that inspired Tolkien's creation. The bucolic countryside, as he saw it, was long gone by the 1930s and 1940s when he wrote the book. (I can further quibble by pointing out that, while Tolkien as a youth lived in "the shires" - Worcestershire, Warwickshire - Robinson's incident took place in Uxbridge, which historically was in Middlesex, a county but not a shire.)

Now: "protected by the hard men of Gondor." This is a grotesque distortion of Tolkien's story. The Shire and its hobbits were not directly protected by Gondor, certainly not in any sense in which a Tommy Robinson parallel would be at all apt. Gondor was very far away. (In what sense Gondor did protect the Shire, I'll get to.) The nugget of accuracy here is that the Shire was protected, but by the Dúnedain, Aragorn's people. In a rather condescending speech at the Council of Elrond, Aragorn says, "The North would have known [peace and freedom] little but for us. Fear would have destroyed them. But when dark things come from the houseless hills, or creep from sunless woods, they fly from us. What roads would any dare to tread, what safety would there be in quiet lands, or in the homes of simple men at night, if the Dúnedain were asleep, or were all gone into the grave? ... Travellers scowl at us, and countrymen give us scornful names. 'Strider' I am to one fat man who lives within a day's march of foes that would freeze his heart or lay his little town in ruin, if he were not guarded ceaselessly. Yet we would not have it otherwise. If simple folk are free from care and fear, simple they will be, and we must be secret to keep them so. That has been the task of my kindred, while the years have lengthened and the grass has grown."

And I suppose if you're sufficiently evil-minded, simple-minded, and starkly prejudiced, you could draw a parallel between those "foes" and the immigrants denounced by the likes of Tommy Robinson. But it does violence to Tolkien's story to do so.

But in what sense are the Dúnedain "hard men"? They're tough fighters when necessary, to be sure, but Aragorn says they keep secret. The Dúnedain are known in Bree only as the Rangers, mysterious "wandering folk" who pop in from time to time. They're not known in the Shire at all. Aragorn is very gentle with Frodo, because he needs to win his trust. I will leave any suggestion that this is even remotely like the posturing of Tommy Robinson with the silence it deserves.

Now, back to Gondor. In Tolkien's story, Gondor played another part. Its role was to defend the bulkwarks of the West against the onslaught of Mordor. From a distance, yes, this is in the defense of everything behind them, including the Shire. But its equivalent in a blinkered simplistic post-WW2 distorted-Tolkien fable is not indigenous rabble-rousers like Tommy Robinson, but NATO, protecting the West against the armies of the USSR and then Putin. Completely irrelevant to Musk's and Robinson's warnings against immigrants.

But if we do apply Gondor to this scenario, Musk's entire intended moral point falls apart.

Most importantly, Gondor's defense is insufficient. Even with allies, it cannot hold off Mordor entirely. Mightily though Gondor struggles, relying on it as your protection will fail. As Gandalf tells Frodo, there is but one thing that prevents Sauron from gaining the "strength and knowledge to beat down all resistance, break the last defences, and cover all the lands in a second darkness." And that is that "he lacks the One Ring." Which cannot be used by the West either, or only a second Sauron would emerge. It is the two tiny figures of Frodo and Sam, crawling through the dust of Mordor on a quest to destroy the Ring entirely, who are the key to the achievement of the story. It is (spoiler alert) the destruction of the Ring which saves the Host of the West from final annihilation by the forces of Mordor at the last minute.

Where is the equivalent of this in Musk's metaphor? There is none.

Then we're back to the "hard men" again. Like the Dúnedain of the North, Gondor's men are doughty warriors. But the unfortunate fates of Boromir and Denethor are there to show us the perils of relying on your status as "hard men." It is easily possible to be too hard, too rigid, and to fool yourself about the nature and extent of the dangers you face. Panic - from what Denethor sees, or thinks he sees, in the palantír, and what Boromir fears in the refusal to employ the Ring - is the cause of their error and the source of their downfall, and that Musk and Robinson are similarly panicked over immigrants seems depressingly obvious.

Better far than being "hard men" is the role and position taken by the noblest of all Gondor's warriors, Faramir - whom I begin to think is the most misunderstood character in The Lord of the Rings; certainly he was profoundly misunderstood by Peter Jackson. In his profoundly wise statement, Faramir says, "War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend: the city of the Men of Númenor; and I would have her loved for her memory, her ancientry, her beauty, and her present wisdom."

I think a little more love of what we defend, and less lusting for the sword and the arrow and the "hard men" who wield them, would do us good. That is one thing Tolkien is trying to tell us.

wrong again

I spoke too soon when I told my brother on the phone Saturday evening that my procedures had gone with little hitch. Sunday was one of the more unpleasant days of my existence, and it may take a few more days to recover. Fortunately I have only a few things to do.

historical clang

A British paper like the Independent ought to know its own history better than this. An article on Labour MPs losing faith in the leadership of Prime Minister Starmer includes this:

One senior Labour MP said: “No 10 think he [Starmer] is Blair, but the PLP think he’s Ramsay MacDonald with nicer hair.” MacDonald, Labour’s first PM, eventually took the party to its worst ever election defeat, and was later expelled from the party for forming a government with the Tories.

No, first he formed a government with the Tories that almost all the Labourites refused to go along with, then they suffered their worst ever election defeat without him. I think his formal expulsion may not have occurred until afterwards, but he was definitely on the other side in that election. This was 1931; you could look it up. I told the whole story here. My conclusion: though they lost, the rest of the Labour Party had the right of the matter. MacDonald was well-meaning but sadly mistaken.

visualization

Read during yesterday's procedures, Nov. 3 New Yorker with an article by Larissa MacFarquhar on people with aphantasia, the inability to summon to mind mental images, typically from one's own memory. People with this condition tend to think of abstract representations of the concept instead, which can be an advantage when a specific personal memory would be a distraction from the topic, and they often have trouble in general recalling details of their own distant pasts.

I don't think I quite have this, but it is true that I'm not very visually oriented. During conversations with people, for instance, I am concentrating so tightly on the content of what's being said that my eyes are off in the middle distance, not looking closely at the people I'm talking with.

But what really caught my attention was the report that many such people can easily recall things that are spatial rather than visual - it appears to be an entirely different sort of memory classification - and some have a truly awesome ability to remember music. That's me. I have a solid ability to remember and analyze geographic direction pathways, I'm interested in architecture far more than in other visual arts, and I can remember works of music that I know almost, though not quite, as well as the one who can summon up a 45-minute summary of Verdi's Requiem by just thinking about it. I tend to fatigue over remembering long works by scratch, but during a performance I always know exactly what is coming next.

It's not just music, either. When I remember my deceased parents, the images that come to mind tend to be those in photographs rather than direct memory. But I can recall the sounds of their voices precisely. That's because I was listening to what they were saying rather than concentrating on looking at them.

Where do you sit on this scale?

where

I was in a hurry for some reason when I put down my reading glasses, and I remember thinking, "This is not where I usually put them." But where that somewhere was, I now cannot in the least recall.

For several days now, I've been checking every shelf and drawer in the house without luck. I use the glasses mostly for the computer screen. Without them, I have to bring my face right up to the screen - that, or increase the font size bigly, which I don't like doing because I find it choppy to read with fewer words visible.

I dreamed I found them, but I checked when I woke up and they weren't there.

My vision hasn't changed much, but I may have to schedule an eye exam and then buy new glasses. What a nuisance, especially with my schedule already being filled up with medical appointments. I hope they still have the heavy black frames I got these with, because I wanted something sturdy for glasses I was always taking on and off (though not as eccentrically as Derren Nesbitt in that Prisoner episode).

when to hang up the phone

We have a landline, which means we get a lot of junk and spam calls despite being on the Do Not Call registry.

This is not a reason to give up the landline, because I get junk calls on my cell phone too. Most of the latter are in Chinese and appear to be live persons. The last one to call when I had the phone on called three times before registering - whether understanding my English or not - my saying "You have the wrong number" and hanging up.

Many of the junk calls on the landline used to be live persons. I had good luck squashing them by telling political callers that we have a rule in this household: we don't vote for any candidate who calls us more than once. Another oddity was one caller who asked to speak to the homeowner. "They're not here," I said; "they're never here." "I don't understand," said the caller. I replied, "Have you ever heard of ... rentals?" And then hung up. But a lot of callers, whether live or recorded, are from police charities or "the department of medicare" or something, so I just say, whether live or recorded, "Wrong number" and hang up.

What I really hate is live callers who begin by giving their name but then saying, "How are you today?" This is a fine piece of social lubrication to begin a mutually-agreed upon business conversation between two people who each know why the other is there. It is not a good way to begin one where the party being asked is completely ignorant of who the caller is or what they want. I usually say something like "That's a strange question to call somebody up in order to ask them." Then they usually hang up.

However, I'm expanding my rules for hanging up immediately without saying anything.

I'd noticed that calls that turned out to be boiler-room salespeople always began with, after you picked up and said "Hello?" a little boing sound. I think this was to notify the boiler room switching equipment, which probably calls many numbers at once, that here was a live one, before transferring to a person, which always took a few seconds. So now when I hear that sound, I instantly hang up.

But now I'm getting a lot of calls without the boing in which the response to my saying "Hello?" is for the caller also to say "Hello?" Before I established that these were all recorded, I figured it was a boiler-room who had just been switched onto the line and who said this to verify they had a caller. So I would say, "No, you called me. The way this works is, I say hello, and then you tell me who you are and what you want." Then there follows a pause while the computer tries to figure out what kind of response this is. Then they give a name and launch into the prerecorded spiel.

So my new rule is: If the response to my saying "Hello?" is to also say "Hello?" I will hang up immediately. I may trip up some live callers with bad connections this way, but they'll probably call back, like that Chinese-speaker did. I just don't want to waste any more phone etiquette lessons on robots.

concert review: San Francisco Symphony

David Afkham, a German conductor new to SFS, led two wildly unalike Russian works, Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto (with Sergey Khachatryan) and Shostakovich's Eighth Symphony. Amazing that only 65 years separate them.

Actually they do have one thing in common: when they were new, people who disliked them derided them as vulgar. But there was nothing vulgar about Friday's performances. Though there's plenty of vigor in the Tchaikovsky concerto, the overall mien of the piece was soft and gentle, perhaps taking a cue from the soloist, who leaned so far in that direction that the high notes in his cadenza disappeared off the edge of audibility. (And his encore was a soft and gentle Armenian lament that went on for quite a while.)

Afkham did something similar with the Shostakovich, at least in the slower, first and fourth movements. The stark tragedy of these parts in other performances vanished entirely, and it was ... soft and gentle. This didn't stop the more vicious parts of the first movement from being firm enough, or the two scherzi from being fairly caustic. The finale leaned towards the cheerful, but gave full value to the enigmatic ending, where - as with the Fourth but none of the intervening works - Shostakovich refuses to supply an upbeat conclusion.

The result of this combination of fast parts played in a usual manner and slow parts purged of the strongly emotional was an Eighth that felt entirely different from any performance of the work I'd heard before. Weirdly revelatory.

library books to read during long medical procedures

(liable to be the first in a series)

Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (Norton, 2011)
A deconstruction of everything I learned at school about the mighty 19C transcontinental railroad system. First, as I knew well, they weren't transcontinental: they only ran west from places like Omaha and St. Louis. But though the existing system covered everywhere east of there, it wasn't continuous: different gauges, breaks between lines, made everything slow. The transcontinentals were supposed to pay for themselves with freight, but freight trains were irregular and ad hoc, and it was still cheaper to send goods by ship via Panama, even though there wasn't a canal there yet, so financing was precarious. The mighty financiers like C.P. Huntington spent their time bailing themselves out of disaster, and they knew nothing about running a railroad. Meanwhile the people who did run the railroad didn't know what they were doing either, and setting freight rates, which had such a big effect on development of the country, was a guesswork procedure. The main lesson of this long and overdetailed book is that everybody was incompetent, including senators: "In making a case for political compromise, one should avoid John Sherman. If Henry Clay was the Great Compromiser, John Sherman was the Not So Great Compromiser."

Martin Amis, The Rub of Time: Bellow, Nabokov, Hitchens, Travolta, Trump: Essays and Reportage, 1994-2017 (Knopf, 2018)
Trump? Yes, I picked up this book because I'd seen that in 2016 Amis reviewed Trump's latest book and compared it with the 30-year-old Art of the Deal, concluding even then "that in the last thirty years Trump, both cognitively and humanly, has undergone an atrocious decline." (But wait: did he write his own books? "We can be confident that Trump had something to do with their compilation: it very quickly emerges that he is one of nature's reluctant micromanagers.")
Other than that, to appreciate this book you have to be really interested in Bellow and Nabokov, and I'm not. (There's not much about Hitchens or Travolta, or Trump.)

another song that goes like this

at least one war

Of all the croggling statements to come out of the presidential mouth lately, the most astonishing is "We’ve never had a president that solved one war, not one war." That's so untrue.

In particular, in 1905 Theodore Roosevelt was the major figure "in bringing to an end the bloody war recently waged between two of the world's great powers, Japan and Russia." And for doing so, he won the Nobel Peace Prize. (The quote is from his prize citation.)

I'm actually inclined to give the occupant some credit for adjudicating a cease-fire in Gaza and the return of the surviving hostages - all along I've said, if Hamas wants to negotiate, they should return the hostages, then we'll talk; well, they've done it, so let's talk - even if his only motivation is the desire for his own prize. What are prizes for, if not to encourage people to perform acts that deserve them? If only he weren't starting more wars, some of them against Portland and Chicago, then he claims to be stopping, it might even be a net plus. Even though we've been in positions like this before in the Mid East, and it always came to nothing.

reimagining Górecki

When the composer Henryk Górecki died 15 years ago, I wrote a post largely about how I'd discovered his music. Excerpts:

Sometime in the mid 1980s, DGK, explorer of new and unusual music, showed me an obscure LP he'd picked up out of random curiosity. Packaged as the soundtrack album to a French film called Police, it consisted in fact of a full recording of a modern Polish symphony for soprano and orchestra. Neither on the record album nor anywhere else that he looked was there much information to be had on the work or its composer, one Henryk Górecki. DGK was astonished and spellbound by the audacity and craft of this music, and, unlike with many of his passions, when he played it for me I was too. ... For years, this marvelous piece of music remained our secret shared passion that hardly anybody else had heard of, like The Lord of the Rings in its early days. When I began to collect CDs a few years later, I found a German import with this work on it, and bought it quickly. Imagine our astonishment, then, when in 1992 a new recording of it on Nonesuch, a well-known American classical label - conducted by David Zinman - became a monster hit and the toast of the classical world, the first contemporary work to reach the top of the classical charts. The musical equivalent of the Lord of the Rings paperbacks had hit the stands. Suddenly our obscure passion was the talk of the town.

The resemblance with being an early Tolkien fan hit me forcibly, though I wasn't old enough to remember that personally. Of course, we didn't think we were literally the only people who knew this piece, but nobody we knew did and no critics we read mentioned it, so it remained our secret gem. And then, all of a sudden in 1992, as with Tolkien in 1965 its fame exploded and everybody, at least in the field, knew it and was talking about it all the time.

Now DGK has sent me a scholarly (but readable) article on the history of the Third's reputation before the Zinman recording. It didn't have the wide renown of subsequent years, but no, it wasn't that obscure. It was played and commented on. True, some people hated it (and still do!) but it was generally praised and considered remarkable. I guess we just never came across those. Though in fact DGK tells me that he'd gone looking for the record after reading a review in Fanfare, the review magazine for fans of the truly esoteric in classical record collecting. I hadn't known of that alert, but it proves the point: there was awareness and praise of the work.

But the article makes the situation remind me even more forcibly of Tolkien. For, of course, there were lots of reviews of The Lord of the Rings when it first came out in 1954-55, and articles about it later; it just wasn't the widespread popular phenomenon it became after 1965. And, as with Górecki's Third, though there's an assumption that it was generally panned when new, that turns out not to be true. There's an article in the upcoming Tolkien Studies 21 - which is in press right now - called "Reconsidering the Early Critical Response to The Lord of the Rings" by Matthew Thompson-Handell, which reveals that the general early critical response to the book was quite favorable, even among some of the reviews which have gained a reputation as pans. The guy who wrote, "This is not a work which many adults will read through more than once"? That's taken totally out of context and does not express what he meant. Read Thompson-Handell's article and you'll see.

concert review: SF Music Day

Today I did get up to the City early on. But as I didn't need to be there until 12.30 instead of 10.00, it was easier.

The topic was SF Music Day, an annual event I'd never heard of before. The promoters take over the Veterans Building for an afternoon, presenting 6 events (each slightly less than an hour) in each of three concert spaces in the building. Times are coordinated, so attendees can hop from one room to another, but I didn't. Most of the items in Herbst Theatre, the main space, were jazz-oriented, so I planted myself for the entire afternoon in the cavernous and echoing room on the second floor where the classical performers were. The acoustics were fine for the music, but it was difficult to make out any spoken words from anybody.

The highlights came at the end. Pianist Elizabeth Schumann thundered her way through Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition and loaded it with enough tone color that an orchestration seemed superfluous. Then she surprised everybody by choosing for an encore Gershwin's "Embraceable You," but encores have a long tradition of clashing strongly with the main work. Then Schumann came back with four of her colleagues from Ensemble San Francisco for an energetic and catchy run through Dvořák's Op. 81 Piano Quintet.

The day had begun with the Benicia Chamber Players, who regularly perform on both sides of the Carquinez Strait, in two movements from Schubert's "Rosamunde" Quartet, the work I missed yesterday, and a squeaky squawky work by Gabriella Smith. Then some of the young chamber musicians who are the subjects for master classes at Kohl Mansion played movements from string quartets and piano quartets by the Viennese classicists.

In between these and the closing numbers, we got a couple more varied groups. The Turas Ensemble is two barefoot sopranos who sing ethereal versions of I know not what, because I couldn't make out any of their spoken explanations of what they were doing, or their lyrics either. Some songs unaccompanied, some with dulcimer or hurdy-gurdy or whatnot. And the Berkeley Choros Ensemble play instrumental popular music from Brazil, rather pleasant to listen to and moving enough to encourage one older couple to get up and dance, or at least sway together, to the music.

Getting out of a concert in the City at 5.45 on a Sunday - not Friday or Saturday when places would be crowded - would ordinarily be a perfect time to seek out a restaurant for dinner. But today I felt no urge to do that, and went straight home instead, where I'm partaking what I ought.

two concerts in a day

It was going to be three, but going up to the City for a morning string quartet event and then dashing back down here for the afternoon seemed a bit much to attempt in the current state. So two it was, both community orchestra events in my local area.

The Winchester Orchestra under James Beauton essayed a Halloween concert. It had both Danse Macabre (excellent solo work by concertmaster Bill Palmer) and Night on Bald Mountain (the old, Rimsky-edited version of Mussorgsky's score). It had Stokowski's arrangement of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, favorite music of evil scientist organists everywhere. The orchestra struggled with the beginning of the fugue. It had a dance from The Firebird, and they struggled even more with that. It had music from two movies, Psycho (with the conductor making a stabbing motion with the baton when we got to that scene, as if the music wasn't clue enough) and The Mummy Returns. And we had a ten-minute précis of Johan de Meij's Lord of the Rings Symphony in an orchestrated version (the original is for concert band). It summarized up three of the five movements: Gandalf, Lothlórien, and Hobbits, and they did that one very well.

The Palo Alto Philharmonic under Lara Webber began with Of Paradise and Light by Augusta Read Thomas for strings, a weak echo of Barber's Adagio, and continued with the Suite for Viola and Small Orchestra by Vaughan Williams. This concerto, for that's what it is, in eight short movements is from VW's pastoral side with no hint of the hairier directions his music was taking by 1934 when he wrote this. But it's not top-drawer VW pastoral either, though soloist Jenny Douglass played very well. For a conclusion, Brahms's First. There was some blattiness, but for the most part this came off lucidly and excitingly. This work is naturally very heavy, but here it was both light and powerful, a nice trick if you can pull it off.

absence

Been away for a couple of days. Not on my favorite form of vacation. Now back. Very thirsty, mostly.

posthumous Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin's Book of Cats (Library of America, 2025)

The Word for World: The Maps of Ursula K. Le Guin, edited by So Mayer and Sarah Shin (Silver Press and AA Publications, 2025)

Le Guin, cats, and maps - three of my favorite things. How could I resist? I ordered both of these (the second is from the UK, and is in connection with an exhibition) in advance, not knowing what I was going to get.

The Book of Cats is not a regular Library of America publication - it's short (about 100 pages) and on thicker, lightly tinted paper. It's not a complete collection of her writings on cats - no Catwings, no essays on the life of Pard. But it does have a lot of cat poems, only some of which have been previously published, and a couple of author-drawn picture stories, one on the art of cat arranging (or how to lounge in a typical feline fashion), which has only been seen before as a rare pamphlet, and a cat-and-mouse superhero comic, and some other illustrations, and a delightful series of letters among cats about proper behaviors, like Head Scratching:

When the Female Human is facing the wrong way in bed she needs to be rearranged, so I come and scratch the top of her head until she turns over and faces the correct direction so that I can lie down beside her pillow with my butt in her face and go to sleep.

Lastly, an annotated and dated list of all 20 cats which had custody of UKL in her lifetime (plus a photo of her at age 3 petting the first in the set), from which I figured that the one I met on my one visit to her house was Lorenzo aka Bonzo, whom she introduced to me as an "elderly gentleman" as he lay cradled in her arms.

The Word for World intersperses maps, mostly hand-drawn by UKL herself, with essays by various hands. Some of the maps are previously published, some are not. The unpublished ones include maps of Earthsea with tiny differences from the published ones, further talismanic maps of the Valley of the Na, diagrams of seasons on Werel (the one from Planet of Exile - keep up, now), and most interesting, a map of the provinces, principal cities, and major rivers of Orsinia, which does look a lot more like Hungary than it does like Czechoslovakia - I always thought it would.

I've never found critical writings on Le Guin to be as interesting as those on some of my other favorite writers, and that's true here too. The only essay I got much out of was the one by her son Theo, which talked about influences - the vital role of the ranch Kishamish in her life, a map of St Helena she found in France which may have affected her style, a comparison of her aesthetics with those of Tolkien. I really appreciated that.

Eichler

Today the first rains of the season arrived. It poured heavily and wetly for about four hours, which is longer than the heavy downpours usually last around here. Nevertheless I ventured out into it, and I was far from the only one, to the local history museum for an evening talk about Eichlers.

No veteran residents in Silicon Valley need to be told what that means. An Eichler is a home built by the developer Joseph Eichler, who in the 1950s-70s was one of the many builders busy turning the local orchards into tract housing developments. Eichlers came in various models, but they all had a strong family resemblance, and until the imitations ("Like-lers") came along, looked like nothing else for sale in the middle-class housing market.

For one thing, they were built in post-and-beam construction, with no load-bearing walls. That meant those walls could be light or intermittent or even made of glass. The resultant opening up to the outside (many Eichlers came with courtyards or atria) and the Prairie School-like expansiveness of the beam-driven construction is what made Eichlers feel like "Frank Lloyd Wright for the masses," more effectively than Wright's own Usonian houses.

Eichlers are easily recognizable from the outside by their beam ends, grooved wood on the facades, and low-slung roof rises. To this day there are whole blocks in this area with nothing but Eichlers.

The speaker was a real estate agent who specializes in Eichlers. He talked a lot about maintaining sale value and on remodeling to update Eichlers (original construction was a bit shoddy) while keeping the mid-20C spirit of the original. Most of the audience were Eichler owners concerned about whether their neighbors were going to build second stories. I grew up in an Eichler but haven't lived in one for many years; I may have been the only person there whose primary interest was in architecture as an art form. Nevertheless when I asked a question along those lines, the speaker proved to be well-informed.

I learned something of the history of Eichlers, both the firm and the style of houses; and where exactly they are. I learned that the realtor keeps maps of Eichler developments, such as this one of my town; my family's Eichler was in Fairbrae Addition, the big red blotch in the middle of the map. Here, this is a typical Eichler.

three concerts

1. The concert I went to up in the hills was a wind octet concert I was reviewing for the Daily Journal.

With a remote winery setting and with a fancy hot hors d'oeuvres and wine buffet out on the balcony beforehand (the grilled salmon skewers were delicious), this was a concert designed for the well-off to enjoy themselves. The general location, in the thoroughly Well-offville part of the area, and the extremely steep admission price, also contributed to the effect. I wouldn't have gone if I hadn't been comped as a reviewer.

However, I'm glad I did go, because the music was excellent, and so were the acoustics of the tiny hall. Two each of oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and horn played one of Mozart's serenades for that combo. (No flutes? Some claim Mozart didn't like the instrument. Others claim that that's false.) Then a piece by Ruth Gipps, who is one of those mid-20C women composers like Florence Price who is slowly bubbling up from obscurity. And a modern arrangement of excerpts from Smetana's 19C opera The Bartered Bride, complete with a narration amusingly emphasizing how confusing the plot is.

2. Up in the City, the Attacca Quartet took a brisk and compact Haydn quartet (Op. 50/5) and a brisk and compact Bartok quartet (no. 4) and played them to be even more brisk and compact. Also a piece by David Lang (daisy) in his characteristic style of repeating fragments until they add up to something; and a collection of miscellaneous pieces that weren't listed in the program and which I didn't catch what the first violinist said about them.

On my way to this concert, timing was such that I was able to stop off at a farewell party for a household of three that I know who are moving to Ireland this week (one of them being able to claim citizenship there by virtue of ancestry), not the only people I know leaving the US for good. Fortunately the dire implications of this did not dominate the conversations, and everyone was in a rather cheery mood. Many people there whom I knew in the 1970s and '80s but haven't seen much since. We're all a lot older.

3. Harmonia California, a little nonprofessional string orchestra, did a gratifyingly good job on some Mozart (including the delightful but little-known K. 136 Divertimento) and Bach (the Double Violin Concerto), and then ventured into two obscurer pieces from the turn of the 20C, both excellent works it was a pleasure to hear: Anton Arensky's Variations on a Theme of Tchaikovsky and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's Four Noveletten. Gratifyingly well worth going to.

the accursed scholarly paper

Well, maybe not that accursed. This is the fourth time I've given this paper - it was premiered less than 15 months ago - and only the second time something went wrong.

The first time was the other time. I was ill and isolating at the conference and couldn't read the paper. So the papers coordinator did it for me.

This time was for a regular meeting of a Zoom group online. In the middle of reading it from the Word copy on my screen, my computer froze. I had to apologize and take a break. In the end, I had to hard-reboot the computer (i.e. press the power button) and it took almost 20 minutes to get everything up and running again, counting all the kerfluffle I'd spent trying to avoid having to do that. How embarrassing.

The other two times went very well indeed. So yes, maybe not that accursed.

figuring out Taylor Swift again

Some time ago I wrote of my delighted discovery of Taylor Swift's Tiny Desk Concert, in which she played her songs in simple arrangements I found agreeable, unlike the overproductions of the Eras Tour which was Not For Me.

A few commenters gave suggestions of other TAS numbers I might find agreeable, but they didn't mention what turned out to be the gold mine. Quite recently, DGK sent me links to a couple videos extracted from a documentary film called folklore: the long pond studio sessions, which is on Disney+. The songs are a bit much of a sameness for me to want to listen to all at once, especially with the documentary natter in between, and the songs are more immediately impressive than they are lovable, though the ones I heard first are growing on me rapidly - but only in these versions; I listened to other performances and, nah. Any one or two of them - not just those two - are in this version very much the kind of popular music I want to hear.

Apart from the addition of a guest vocalist on one song, it's just her and two guys, variously on piano and acoustic guitar, occasionally a little light percussion or a soft electric guitar which only once threatens to get even slightly loud. Very soft and gentle and intimate, and quite sophisticated and complex songwriting.

Here's the two songs DGK sent me. The rest can also be found on YouTube with a "long pond studio sessions" search.

Terry Garey

Gone now. She'd been ill for a long time, but for a long time before that she had been an ornament of Twin Cities, and before that Bay Area, fandom. Quiet, often motionless, but managing never to be inconspicuous, she was easy to talk with - and it was with, not to, because without ever being loud or pushy she was always responsive and involved in conversation. She was one of the people who gave the circles she belonged to their special flavor.

I am one of many,
many,
many,
many people who knew and loved Terry and felt a special connection to her.

I would see her around at Little Men's, around the Portable Bookstore, in The Other Change of Hobbit after that opened - she clerked there for a while, and I got to walk in one day and wish her happy Boxing Day, back when few people in this country knew what that was - the Magic Cellar, parties and meals and conventions. After she moved to Mpls, I was changing planes there once and contacted her beforehand, so she came down to the airport (this was before 9/11) and we had lunch.

I think the most special thing she did for me was to convince me to join Spinoff, which was one of the apas founded to continue the mixed-sex conversations of the original AWA after the men were asked to leave. Spinoff had a loose and random/goofy air to it, Firesign Theater and FKB, and I found it best to write for it late at night, when my mind was disconnected and could free associate. There was a bit of that to Terry too, but she was never undirected and always knew where she was going.

not going anywhere today

Most of my recent adventures would have been inconvenient to describe, but I can tell you about this one.

I set off this morning to drive to the City for the Tachyon Books party. But I didn't get there. A few miles up the freeway, one of my tires shredded itself. I pulled over with caution and some difficulty and called AAA, figuring the guy could put on my temporary tire from the trunk - I wasn't going to try that myself, still less with a freeway immediately at my back - and I could limp to a tire store.

But when he arrived, he reported I had no temp. What? I did the last time I had to do this. But that was probably not this car. The man told me that temps are not standard equipment on Hyundais, and I didn't even get this one new, but surplus from a rental company.

So I had to wait again for a tow truck, first having a difficult colloquy with the first guy over where he was going to request the tow truck to take me. I hadn't had much need for a tire store lately, but I'd been pleased with the place I'd taken B's car a couple years ago when it needed a thorn removed from its paw. Guy didn't want to take me there. My free towing limit distance was 5 miles, and this was 9 miles; I'd have to pay $15/mile. I said I knew that. He went away to call it in and then came back and said he'd found a place closer than 5 miles. It was called Super Cheap Tires. I said I wasn't going to a place with a name like that; it sounded like a ripoff joint. He argued further but I insisted and repeated I was ready to pay.

When the tow truck driver arrived I told him also that I was ready to pay, but instead he pulled out his device and calculated a shorter route along local streets. It was 5.6 miles, he said, which made me wonder what route could possibly have been 9 miles. Furthermore, he said, he wouldn't charge me for the .6 mile.

I wonder if there's some reason other than desire to save the customer money to avoid tows that charge by the mile. Maybe there's paperwork they hate to fill out. Anyway, he took me there by an intelligent route. (I know this area; I've lived here since 1959.) He knew where the store was; he'd towed cars there plenty of times.

The store guys did their expected good and not-too-expensive job (see? Super Cheap, phooey) and I was on my way. But by now I wanted lunch more than to drive an hour to the City, and was pretty tired after all this, so I just went home.

one has music, the other doesn't

I've been to two stage productions in the last two days.

The musical one was South Bay Musical Theatre's production of The Sound of Music. Advertising for this heavily emphasized how the stage show is not sappy like the movie. And it was a good show, consistently interesting all the way through, fine singing, acting enough to give the impression those were the characters, not people playing them. Maria (Lauren D'Ambrosio) looked rather maternal, a bit disconcerting at the beginning, highly appropriate by the end; the Captain (Brad Satterwhite) kept from melting his emotions just long enough; Mother Abbess (Kama Belloni) thrilled everyone by belting out the end of "Climb Ev'ry Mountain"; the children (all but Liesl were double-cast) were amazingly good, in movement as well as voice; the Nazis were effectively sinister. The favorite songs - the title song, "My Favorite Things," "Do-Re-Mi" - were delivered with fresh energy, renewing appreciation of what remarkably good songs they are. A real winner.

The non-musical one was Theatre Works delivering their section of the rolling world premiere of Lauren Gunderson's new adaptation of Little Women. This did not work: it was too stagy, and the cast could be seen working their butts off rather than embodying the characters. Much of this was due to Gunderson's inept framing: the story is framed as Alcott writing it, and even within the frame half the dialogue is delivered in the third person, the actors describing what their characters are thinking or doing. This distanced the characters from the audience, destroying any illusion that the actors were the characters. The zippy condensation, in which events vanish in a flash, didn't help either. A real snore.

in the hills

I went to a concert last night. I'll tell about the music when my review is published in the Daily Journal, but the venue turned out to be problematic. It was in a small hall perched on the balcony of a winery at the top of the mountains that overlook our urban area. The view out over the valleys and the bay was spectacular, at least before the sun went down. But getting up there in the first place, and even more getting back afterwards, was another story.

To get up to the top of the mountains anywhere in the middle of their run, you have a choice of three or four extremely twisty and winding roads climbing up the slopes. I chose Page Mill Road, which is the closest to the winery. I got off the freeway at Moody Road, which for much of its length goes winding but not twistily up a creek canyon and then attaches to Page Mill, which powers its way straight up the slope. I've known this area since I used to bicycle around in it at the age of 8, but I don't go up there often, and the sudden and extreme hairpin turns on Page Mill still have the power to surprise; only afterwards do I say, "Oh yeah, I remember that one."

Coming back at night was even hairier. The road running along the summit of the mountains, Skyline Boulevard, is winding but not twisty, and can be dangerous because cars tend to speed along it faster than it can handle. And in the dark and the fog I missed the crossing of Page Mill, where there is apparently no sign other than the tiny street signs. After a while I realized this, and figured I might as well continue another winding ten miles or so to the next access, Congress Springs Road, which is a state highway, so there ought to be a visible sign at the crossing.

There was a sign, but to my surprise nothing designating it as a highway. Just a directional sign pointing off to Big Basin. If Big Basin is to the right, then this is where I want to go left. This road has fewer surprise hairpins than Page Mill, but it's every bit as twisty, and it goes on just as long. In the dark and the fog I often couldn't tell which way the road was going to turn next, and I missed noting any of the landmarks I know along that road which would tell me how far I'd gotten. Eventually, after much exhaustion, I knew I'd reached the end when suddenly dumped out onto the main street of the quaint downtown of Saratoga. Turn left at the other end of town and it's literally a straight shot home. So I got here, but I will certainly pause before considering doing this at night again.

phone behavior

Yeah, I've seen the videos in which young people are presented with a dial telephone and try to figure out how it works. I haven't forgotten the time I saw a phone book from the 1910s with detailed instructions on how to dial a phone, that being quite a new technology then.

But I've just had a personal encounter with unfamiliarity with other aspects of old-fashioned phone behavior.

It was a call to establish a medical appointment. The young-sounding woman on the line said she'd tried to call before, but had gotten a beeping sound. That's called a busy signal. I don't have voice mail on this phone.

Then she said, if you need to call back to change the appointment, use the number displaying on your phone. My phone does not display numbers. She had to read it to me.

Of course, none of this would be true if the call had been on my cell phone, but I don't like using the cell phone when I'm at home. (Partly because reception is bad here. We're one mile from Apple world headquarters, but that doesn't mean we have a good cell signal.) I use the good old-fashioned landline.

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.

BISQC, day 7

Box score:
1st. Poiesis Quartet
2nd. Arete Quartet
3rd. Quartet KAIRI

And so it's over. A couple hours after the end of last night's final concert of the Banff International String Quartet Competition with all the competitors, the three finalists were announced. (The one time I saw this happen in person, the director just got up before a microphone at the campus bistro, where a lot of us were hanging out for the evening.) That led to a concert this afternoon with each of the three finalists taking a long set, and then after a couple more hours of cogitation, the formal announcement of the three-place results, this one on the concert hall stage with a lot of applause and handing out of certificates.

In past years, the finalist round has consisted of a full performance of a major Beethoven or Schubert quartet, but this year they moved the ad lib round into that place. Each finalist had 45 minutes to play whatever they wanted for string quartet, subject only to the provisios that 1) they had to include at least three different composers, 2) at least full movements, no excerpts, 3) nothing they'd previously played during the festival, 4) though they could choose works by any connecting principle or none, they had to write an essay explaining why they'd made that selection. These essays were distributed to the in-person audience as program inserts, but if they made it onto the website, I couldn't find it.

So here are the finalists, what I thought of their earlier performances, what they played in the finalist round and how it came out.

First place, winner of the 2025 competition, is the Poiesis Quartet, and I have to say I'm very pleased. I thought they were by far the best of the three finalists. Particularly fine were their outstanding Brahms and extremely good Bartók. I also liked their playful Haydn and their dramatic Beethoven. The only thing I found disappointing was their 21st century selection, which they may have played well but which was not interesting music. They were at least the most interesting looking of all the competitors. They eschewed standard concert wear entirely, and their dress and grooming were ... well, this photo gives a good idea. They also use more gender-neutral pronouns than all the other competitors put together. They're Americans who are all graduates of the Oberlin Conservatory, and it's been suggested they may have picked up some of their style there, or maybe that's the appeal that's the reason they went there.

Poiesis's finalist recital was also all living 21st century composers, but it came out very differently from the earlier round. All four of these works were very interesting, even at times captivating, if not ingratiating. Two of them were basically quiet. Jerod Impichchaachaaha' Tate is a composer of the Chickasaw Nation, whose work I've heard done by the Oakland Symphony. His Pisachi has some fast and dramatic sections, but is mostly slow held notes with a strong folk flavor perhaps inherited from the composer's people. An even more hushed piece titled Phosphorescent Sea was well described by its title. Its composer was Joe Hisaishi, much older than the other composers on Poiesis's list and best known as the house composer for Hayao Miyazaki's films. Brian Raphael Nabors, an African-American composer who's also going to be done by Oakland, offered the first faster piece, a quartet that's brisk and snappy, bristling with colorful effects. The Seventh Quartet by Kevin Lau, Canadian of Chinese birth, was also fast and lively if less colorful than Nabors. These were all strongly and intelligently played and well sold by the Poiesis Quartet.

Second place goes to the Arete Quartet, two women and two men from Korea. They did a fine Schumann, and I also liked their clean and elegant Haydn. They did a lively job on their 21st century selection, but I disliked the piece. But I found their Schubert wanting in coherence and their Berg bloodless and enervating; they got very bad ratings from me for those.

For the finalist round, Arete picked a more conventional 20C program, Britten's Three Divertimenti and the same Janáček First Quartet that Kairi and Cong already did. Arete went even further than Cong on this one, building up the dissonant squawks and sounding as if the consonant passages existed only to increase the contrast. And to provide a third composer, Arete played the Mozart movement whose weird introduction gives the K. 465 quartet the nickname "Dissonant."

Third place goes to Quartet KAIRI, which I'm not going to use the capital letters on all the time. This group consists of four men. They're Japanese or Chinese by origin, but they're all studying in Salzburg now, so they consider that their home base. Their best performance was their thick and resonant Haydn; they won a special prize for the best Haydn performance of the round. Their Mendelssohn and Schubert seemed to me adequate but not the outstanding work you expect here, and their Janáček First was the opposite of Arete, attempting to dampen down the dissonance in defiance of the composer's intent. Their 21C piece was a piece of retro modernism of the sort I find undesirable.

Kairi's finalist round, like Arete's, consisted of two standard 20th century works leavened with a little Mozart. One of the pieces was Landscape by Toru Takemitsu, whose shows its old modernist character by making its sound sheets full of stringent dissonance. Tate and Hisaishi don't do that. More to my taste was Shostakovich's Eighth Quartet, but I had a harder time parsing their slow and gentle approach to the outer movements. The Mozart was two movements from K. 575, one of the Prussian Quartets.