Alan Bostick

I was quite surprised to read from File 770 that Alan Bostick had died a week ago, both because, well, he was younger than I, and because I'd had hoped to have heard such news through the personal grapevine.

Alan was a long-standing member of the Bay Area/Seattle fannish nexus, having lived in both places at various times. He was, as F770 noted, first known for one of the first of a 1980s wave of "ensmalled" fanzines, short and frequent, which he appropriately titled Fast and Loose. In recent years his principal activity was playing poker - Texas Hold 'Em was his variety - at which I gather he became quite skilled.

Alan and I were friendly in our earlier years - I was on the mailing list for the entire run of Fast and Loose - but over time he seems to have found me exasperating, and consequently I felt uncomfortable with him. Nevertheless he could be friendly, waving hello when we came across each other at the eclipse viewing party at Redding's Sundial Bridge in 2012. The last time I saw him was a month ago at Corflu. He greeted me when we passed in the hallway, but alas he was wearing a full-face mask and I didn't realize it was him until too late to respond.

I'd like to offer you a sample of Alan's writing, but all I can dig up are two issues of Fast and Loose, both from 1980 and both numbered 3 for some reason, but both devoted mostly to discussion of procrastination over getting the next issue out. One of them starts like this:

"I can't do it, I can't do it," I said with my mouth. The person to whom I was speaking with the aforementioned orifice was Teresa Nielsen Hayden, who is my roomate, and the subject was her question-- "When are you going to publish another issue of Fast and Loose, 'the Frequent fanzine'?"
"I can't, I tell you!" I shouted. "Russian troops are in Afghanistan, Iran has been holding American hostages for over 100 days, Canada just raised the price of export oil 30%, and they're going to draft my fair young bod to die in Afghanistan!"

Doesn't sound much cheerier than today, does it? It didn't seem so at the time, either. Anyway, Alan's housemates (a more accurate term) eventually convince him that "There are over four billion people living on this planet right now. Statistically speaking, one of them ought to be publishing Fast and Loose."

"I said with my mouth," by the way, is I think a Burbeeism - or if not, it falls in the same category - one of a number of verbal mannerisms introduced into fannish discourse by Charles Burbee in the late 1940s, and used by subsequent acolytes to communicate that they were faanish [sic] fans, fans into fandom for fandom's sake, and not bound to discuss science fiction or anything serious and constructive like that. Instead, they'd write about whatever came to their minds, such as - in this case - not writing anything. Typical of this breed of fannish writing. Anyway, that was a bit of Alan vintage 1980: light, attempted humorous, a bit self-indulgent, but enjoyable if you were his friend or regular reader.

dining from Trader Joe's

What I like Trader Joe's best for is their frozen skillet dinners. The ones I like B. mostly wouldn't, so I have them for lunch, typically half of it and save the rest for zapping the next day. I have had success with B. with some side dishes, especially a dynamite asparagus risotto.

I've for some time been happy with the Kung Pao Chicken, to which I add just one of the two sauce packets: that's enough, and it saves on carbs. But I've added others. They have a Spicy Thai Shrimp Fried Rice which I find addictively tasty, especially after I dig out the peas which are the one thing I don't like. You're supposed to cook the shrimp first, and the packet of shrimp is deeply buried in the package, so I empty the rice out into a large bowl first so I can grab the shrimp. This also makes it easier to get at the peas.

Some time ago - I think it's no longer still there - they had a paella which was also pretty good (again, except for the peas). I told them at the time that if they got a jambalaya of the same kind, I'd buy it. Well, guess what, now they have. It's intensely popular; the second time I went to buy it, a whole double-bin in the frozen food section that was labeled with it was completely empty. I went to another TJ's where I had gotten it before and couldn't find it; I enquired and confirmed they were out, but they said they'd be getting in more with that night's shipments. So I came back the next morning and grabbed some.

The jambalaya has a few veggies - tiny pieces of onion and bell pepper - and a fair offering of andouille sausage slices. If you want chicken or shrimp, you'll have to add it yourself, and I've been doing that. A quarter pound of tiny salad shrimp is enough.

I've also bought a bulgogi rice package, but haven't tried it yet.

misc

1. Sorry I wasn't one of the 8 million protesting for "no kings" on Saturday, but standing around for hours in the sun is no longer in my repertoire. My heart, and more importantly my vote, is with you.

2. Went to see Sullivan's last operetta, The Emerald Isle (yes it's set in Ireland). Not sure why; I'd seen it before. Very sketchy production: no sets, formal dress for costumes. Couldn't make out most of the words, sung or spoken, and the supertitles were nearly invisible.

3. The Lord of the Rings: toughest quiz ever. It's by John Garth, who knows his Tolkien better than almost anyone else active today. I got 25 out of 30, not including the one I would have gotten if I hadn't had a mental glitch, but it does include one that I don't think anyone would get unless they'd already independently noticed this (I had). Some pretty knowledgeable people got as low as 14, so don't feel bad.

arriving at a concert review of the South Bay Philharmonic

So I'm reading all these books of Tolkien scholarship as part of the jury establishing the finalists for an award, and I'm not sure what to do when an otherwise admirable book makes a boneheaded error. Here's a detailed exploration of Tolkien's methodology in making his sub-creation which repeatedly uses Valar and Ainur as synonyms. The Valar are actually a subset of the Ainur, as is perfectly clear from Tolkien's writings on the subject, the most relevant of which this scholar examines in detail, but how closely did he read it? Then there's the book on Tolkien's religious philosophy which defines Methodists as a subset of Anglicans. I don't know what to do with things like this, I really don't.

I thought of that when I got the program leaflet for yesterday's concert of the orchestra in which B. plays viola, and found that it featured works by Ludwig von Beethoven. No such person, though people in Beethoven's time made the same mistake.

Anyway, they made it fairly crisply through the abrupt opening chords of the Coriolan Overture. The Eighth Symphony was extremely hairy, full of sloppy playing and a few big clams, but fun to listen to - more than it was to play, B. says, as m.d. George Yefchak took it very fast. Also on the program, a gentle early string suite by John Rutter and a lively arrangement of that song from K-pop Demon Hunters, much more attractive than the original. Additional pieces for solo piano, string quartet, and bassoon duo made it into something of a variety show rather than an orchestral concert.

concert review: Brentano Quartet

The icon on the DW and LJ versions of this post is a caricature of Haydn, and for once that's really appropriate, for this concert consisted of 3.5 Haydn string quartets. The 0.5 was his final quartet, which he was only able to half-finish. This turned out to be about 1.0 more Haydn quartets than I wanted to hear in one concert, and I grew itchy during the last one. This was a gentle and dignified interpretation of Haydn, without much that was witty - though Haydn often demands a witty approach - and not much more that was energetic, though there was some zip in a few places, notably the finale of Op. 20/4. And that's about all I have to say about a pleasant but unexciting concert. I wonder if I'd have been able to come up with more if I'd been assigned to review it and had my close-listening ears on, though that would require that I have taken a caffeine pill to be more alert, and those are off the menu for me right now for physical pill-swallowing reasons. I fear my fine discernment may be atrophying, or at least I'm experiencing fewer opportunities to exercise it.

impatient crash resolution

We've had a resolution on the insurance question of the U-Haul driver who clipped my car three weeks ago. I'd made a statement on the phone to his insurance company, which they recorded with my permission. The driver has admitted liability, as he bloody well ought to have, so what I get is a reimbursement for the large deductible on my car's repairs. I wonder if I'd have been reimbursed if I'd had to get a rental car too. No reimbursement for the trouble of having to work out using B's car for my errands (mostly medical appointments) for a week. On the other hand, the repair shop nicely cleaned up my car above and beyond the results of the accident, so I get that gratis.

a Gilbert and Sullivan picayune point

The announcement of the Lord Ruthven Awards, named for the vampire in Polidori's pioneering tale, reminds me of another well-known Ruthven in literature, the baronet Sir Ruthven Murgatroyd in Gilbert and Sullivan's Ruddigore, and an error associated with him.

Sir Ruthven had been living in disguise as a yeoman farmer called Robin Oakapple, but at the end of Act 1 he is unveiled and forced to take up his baronetcy and the family curse associated with it, which is what he'd been trying to avoid. He reintroduces himself as a bad bart in this sung verse, which Sullivan set to sinister music:

I once was as meek as a new-born lamb,
I'm now Sir Murgatroyd - ha! ha!
With greater precision
(Without the elision),
Sir Ruthven Murgatroyd - ha! ha!

Now, Gilbert and Sullivan companies know that the name Ruthven is pronounced 'Rivven', and that fact is noted by Ian Bradley in his Annotated G&S when the name first appears in Act 1. But at this point, Bradley makes a mistake, his only one that I've noticed. He says that "without the elision" means that this one time, the name should be pronounced as spelled, and since his volume originally came out in 1984 I've noted that most G&S performances follow his advice, whereas earlier on they didn't.

But Bradley is wrong! Look at the earlier line: "I'm now Sir Murgatroyd." (A complete error on Gilbert's part, by the way - 'Sir Lastname' is never used in Britain and is the mark of complete illiteracy - but Gilbert, for all his genius, was often clumsy where scansion forced his hand.) The elision is of the entire first name and not of a letter or syllable. Accordingly it is put back in in the subsequent line, but there's nothing about how it's pronounced. If I were playing the part, I would insist on pronouncing it normally. (Although if I were good enough to play principal roles in G&S, I'd prefer to be cast as Ruthven's brother Despard, with B. as his wife, Mad Margaret, so that we could perform the song celebrating their release from durance vile, which you can watch Vincent Price with Ann Howard in here.)

more food

Mark Evanier can't think of any food he disliked as a child but likes now. I can, for myself: scallops, the shellfish. I disliked the taste, find it OK now.

That's not counting a lot of exotic cuisines I would probably have picked at if I'd encountered them as a child but didn't. College and grad school years were the great eras of discovery for me. I remember exactly when I first had Thai food: I was 25 and a colleague where I was working on my grad school work-study program took me out to dinner at what was probably then the only Thai restaurant in San Francisco. It was also one of the two spiciest Thai restaurants I've ever eaten in, the other being in Birmingham, England, a bit of a surprise since English versions of spicy cuisines tend to be very mild.

Memories of great meals of the past are giving me comfort since right now I'm not eating much of anything.

one works, the other doesn't

I went into the Social Security office this morning. As I didn't have an appointment, I had to wait an hour and a half to be seen. (During which I got a lot of reading done.) But when I was seen, the man didn't try to tell me that I could have gotten my 1099 form online. He just took my ID, confirmed my name and address on their system, and grabbed the form from the printer. Out and done in two minutes, and I didn't have to wait for it to arrive in the mail.

Meanwhile the "check engine" light came on in my car. This has happened before. It's usually a phantom alert from an emission control system; at least, the shop was unable to find anything when I asked them to take a detailed look. On another occasion, the same shop just plugged in a reader device and read off that it was the same thing. I asked them to cancel the alert and was on my way.
So I stopped into that shop to ask them to do that, and the guy was a different guy than the one I had before, and he wanted to argue with me. He wanted to take the car in for several days to run a full diagnostic (something which I didn't need; the body shop had done that last week). I asked him just to tell me what the alert said, and we'd figure out what to do next then. If it was the same phantom alert, just cancel it and I'll be on my way. But no, this guy was determined. He told me I was trying to dictate their work. That was pure projection on his part. He was trying to dictate to me, that I should leave my car for days just to find out what the alert said. He got very huffy about it.
I left. I'm not going back there again, not with customer service that rude, condescending, and dictatorial. I went to an auto parts store which can't fix anything, but which will gratis plug their device in and tell you what the alert says. Sure enough, it was the phantom. I thanked them, and I'll let it be until my next servicing.

three concerts

Wednesday, Stanford Music Dept.
The quarterly showcase of matching the students up in chamber music groups. There were a lot of pianists this term, so the concert was full of four-hand and two-piano works by Barber and Rachmaninoff. But the first one, by Mozart, turned out to be scored for two pianos and a cell phone alarm. The scherzo from Ravel's string quartet and the slow movement from Dvořák's Op. 87 piano quartet lacked oomph, but the students get credit for trying.

Saturday, California Symphony
The common thread of the three composers on m.d. Donato Cabrera's program at Lesher in Walnut Creek is that they all came from countries being oppressed by the Russians at the time. Two were contemporary "holy minimalists": Valentin Silvestrov (Ukraine) for Stille Musik, a piece for small string orchestra, beautiful harmonies but disconcertingly off-kilter; and Arvo Pärt (Estonia) for Tabula Rasa, half an hour of two violins playing overlapping hypnotic rocking figures while the string orchestra murmurs behind them. The third was Jean Sibelius (Finland) for his Second Symphony, played as if it were the anthem for Finnish independence it was sometimes taken for. That meant with all the stops out. Even the first movement sounded as grand as the finale, and the finale went totally overboard, the sort of thing that made Virgil Thomson hate Sibelius.
Recent Cal Sym concerts have been pretty full, so it was notable that this one was more sparsely attended. The Sibelius is a crowd-pleaser, so it must have been Silvestrov and Pärt who scared the hordes away.

Sunday, Marea Ensemble
Ensemble consisting of a string quartet (four women) and a soprano (Lori Schulman), presented by the Santa Cruz Chamber Players at their usual church in the hills behind Aptos. What attracted me to this one was the theme of "a journey from despair to hope" bookended by Shostakovich's Eighth Quartet, probably the most suicidal piece in the repertoire, and the "Heiliger Dankgesang" from Beethoven's Op. 132 quartet, probably the most luminous piece in the repertoire.
In the event, the Shostakovich was solemn and deliberate, avoiding slashing vehemence, which more matched it with the equally solemn and quite graceful Beethoven than contrasted with it.
The four pieces in between were all by contemporary American composers, three of them vocal. My favorite was "And So" from Caroline Shaw's song cycle Is a Rose, for its imaginative, varied and sweet accompaniment, but then Shaw is one of my favorite living composers. A cycle by Eliza Brown employed varying styles depending on the nature of the poems, but favored shimmering chords of light dissonance. Source Code by Jessie Montgomery, the instrumental piece, consisted of fragments taken from or evoking spirituals embedded in a soup of dissonance.
Local composer Chris Pratorius Gómez, who shows up on SCCP programs a lot, set "Sonder," a purpose-written poem by local writer Kristen Nelson about shared humanity under crisis. I like patterned poetry, and this was made even more effective by the composer's choice to give some of the lines to the instrumentalists to be spoken, like this:

Singer: Here hawks still circle and screech
Quartet: For now
Singer: Here owls still hoot at night
Quartet: For now

Afterwards I was able to speak to Nelson and compliment her on the poem. A long series of patterned triplets addressed "to a photo of the kids I love / their guts intact in their bellies" included

May they never fear the sky
May they never fear the sea
May they never fear the cops

A rear gut-kicker, that one, I told her, and she said, "Oh good, you got it."

petty annoyances of the week

1. It was still officially winter until Friday, but the weather out here skipped spring and went straight into summer. Temperatures were around 90, hotter in LA. The cats were lying on the linoleum.

2. My car was in the shop for repairs after the stupid U Haul driver clipped me a couple weeks ago. They said it was a 4-day job, so I brought it in Monday morning, but I wasn't able to pick it up until literally ten minutes before they closed for the weekend on Friday. I'd been able to survive the week without a rental (which I'd have had to pay for myself), making necessary errands in B's car, but I'll need my own this weekend, so it's good that's over. The shop did do a very nice job, and cleaned up the interior too.

2a. In the shop's waiting area were magazines to browse, some of them issues of a body shop trade journal called Fender Bender. Most of its contents were about the economics of the trade, but each issue has a puff profile of a shop. One of these is in San Francisco, and the article said it had a branch in Moraine County. That's "moraine" as in what a glacier leaves behind. It's actually Marin.

3. I can't get into the Social Security website to download my 1099. They've changed their login to require a smartphone to jump through the hoops, and like a lot of older Social Security recipients, I have a dumb phone. They don't tell you that you need a smartphone, of course. First is the two-factor ID, so they text you a code. That a dumbphone can handle, but it's the last thing. Then they want you to snap a photo of your ID, but there's actually an option at the bottom, "I don't have a smartphone." That's the last time you'll see that. It offers an upload. So off to FedEx to make a PDF. Then when you try to upload it, they tell you it doesn't take PDFs, only JPGs. Find a site that converts them. Then they tell you your files are too small. Find a site that promises to increase the size of your files. Discover that it reduces them instead. Find another site that actually does as it promises. Upload the files. Then you have to click on a verification URL the site sends to your phone. I can't do that, I don't have a smartphone, remember? I already told you that. Painstakingly copy the long link text to my desktop browser. Get in and answer the questions, but then it says the link has expired because I took too long.
At this point I give up, having not even gotten to the promised final step, which is "a brief video call." I can do video calls, I do them all the time on Zoom, but by now I suspect it will only accept your cell phone number, and I can't do video calls on a dumb phone.
Go to the pre-login part of the SSA website. Tells me I can get the 1099 online. No I can't. Get address of local office. Will go in on Monday morning.

wtf, Cesar Chavez?

The news broke locally a few days ago, and has now percolated out to the general media: charges have been made that Cesar Chavez, the revered farm labor activist, was a sexual molester. Dolores Huerta, his long-time colleague, has said that he both raped and seduced her, and was the father of some of her children. Huerta revealed this in support of two other women who report that Chavez molested them when they were in their teens and he was in his forties. And more have come out.

I didn't write about this earlier because I needed time to process this disturbing news. Chavez has been considered a secular saint at least since his death in 1993. His name is all over buildings and plazas and sidewalks and such like around California and probably elsewhere. Parades are held in his name. His home is a national monument, also with his name on it. There's a near-hagiographical bio-pic starring Michael Peña. His birthday - which is also mine, so I feel a kind of granfalloonish personal connection to him - is a state holiday in California.

Are we to erase all of that? It would be like taking Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson out of the South, wouldn't it? (Something which has not been very comprehensively done.)

Huerta has been sitting on this charge for some 60 years. She says she never said anything about it earlier because it would have harmed the farmworkers movement. Or maybe nobody would have believed her, though perhaps that block has been removed since the Harvey Weinstein case. But that was less than ten years ago, and Chavez had already been elevated to secular sainthood long before that.

The thing is, though, that it's long been known that Chavez was "no angel," as cops like to say of the people they murder on the streets. Chavez was a cruel authoritarian boss, he enforced stereotyped gender roles, he indulged in anti-semitism, he neglected his family, he was pals with Ferdinand Marcos, he was already a known adulterer. We named things for him while overlooking or ignoring these facts. Some of this - notably some shocking misogyny and the neglect of his family - even pop up in that hagiographical bio-pic. As with others of this kind, he was considered a good man - or maybe a great man, which is not the same as "good" - despite his flaws.

But now it turns out ... such a shame, such a horror. Wtf, Cesar Chavez?

more than it seems?

Is Alysa Liu actually happy to be posing with this police officer?

She's giving the British version of "the finger."

breakfast

As a small boy I ate cold cereal for breakfast. I liked sugary treats like Frosted Flakes and Cocoa Puffs, but some cereals like Cap'n Crunch I found over-sugared and would not eat. I also wouldn't touch anything with marshmallow bits in it, so no Lucky Charms.

I ate these dry. At the age of 9 I started finding the taste of milk to be sour and spoiled - I had probably developed a slight allergy - so I simply stopped using it.

As an adult my tastes changed to more boring cereals, like Special K and Product 19. I never much cared for corn flakes, though.

On special occasions, or when eating out for breakfast, I'd go for an omelet or scrambled eggs and sausage. But whatever the breakfast, I never ate very much in the mornings, preferring a large early lunch.

Eventually health reasons led me to give up cereals and I turned to fruit. For a long time this was apples, and I developed a taste for tart but crisp and sweet apples, like Fujis and Braeburns. Occasionally I'd spell these with pears.

But after a while I started finding apples too heavy to eat. I tried other fruits. I liked kiwis, and they're supposed to be good for you, so for a while I ate that. But I found, to my surprise, that while a kiwi as a special treat is great, as a regular diet they quickly palled. I eventually settled on a can of mandarin orange slices. No peeling or tearing up, simple to eat.

That worked fine until I started having trouble swallowing. Oranges would not chew up into mush that I could get down. When I was in the hospital and they put me on a liquid diet, I was surprised to find for breakfast cream of wheat. Did that count as liquid? But I could get it down.

On coming home, I settled on packets of instant cream of wheat. B. has a little kettle that boils water in a jiffy, and a small measuring cup used only for water, so I can fix it easy with a little salt substitute and a lot of margarine added. My dietician approves; she wants the fats and the calories in my otherwise meager diet.

The first time I stopped in at the grocers to buy some more cream of wheat, I discovered to my delight that there was also instant grits. I'm a northerner but I've always had a taste for southern US food, and I love grits. They're basically cream of wheat except with corn (maize). So now I alternate between the two, finishing one box of packets before turning to the other.

And that's my breakfast these days.

context!

A friend wrote about a vehicle service appointment where they recommended some future work which she did not want to do at this time, and I replied:

I put off some non-urgent matters at my last car service appointment, and now I'm getting regular automatically-generated e-mails (I almost wrote "auto-generated," which would be misleading in this context) reminding me that I need this stuff.

a pair of concerts

I attended two concerts last weekend, Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon. Both were nonprofessional groups I've heard before, so I was prepared for the playing to be a little dicey, but the choice of programs interested me.

The Saratoga Symphony featured Saint-Saëns' Piano Concerto No. 1, which conductor Jason Klein said is never played. Maybe not, but I'm sure I'd heard it before, I don't know where, but it sounded awfully familiar. It's a rather declamatory work, opening with a proclamatory call for horn, repeated in trumpet, which proceeds to dominate the first movement. Fortunately, if you can call it that, we had a declamatory soloist in Natalya Lundtvedt, so the result wasn't imbalanced.

Also on the program, a set of tone poems by Max Reger, no more uninteresting than usual for Reger, a rather fetid overture by Cherubini, and an unsatisfactorily airy orchestration of Debussy's "The Engulfed Cathedral."

The tiny string orchestra Harmonia California had a bit of a hit with a Serenade in E Minor by Robert Fuchs, one of those obscure late 19C German composers who play bit parts in biographies of Brahms and the like. The Allegretto movement of this one was both stately and stealthy, had real charm, and was played quite well.

They did well enough in short pieces by Gershwin and Granados (misspelled in the program, I notice), but struggled in the muck with Carl Nielsen's "Little Suite." However, the Bach Third Brandenburg as a closer worked very well, the more impressively as it was without a conductor, director Kristin Link having picked up an instrument and disappeared into the middle of the violins.

Oscar the semi-grouch

I didn't watch the Oscars, I just brought up the results afterwards on a news site. Having only seen two of the nominated films, I didn't have much stake in the outcome, but I was kind of curious.

As expected, it was a showdown between One Battle After Another and Sinners for the big prizes, and they split the two screenplay awards. Sinners is said to be a horror movie, so I'm not going to see it. No argument, no discussion, I'm just not.

I did, however, see One Battle After Another, and to my surprise I rather liked it. This is a surprise because I've seen three previous Paul Thomas Anderson movies, I didn't much like one and detested both of the others. But this one was good, and rewatchable.

The movie is in two parts, the first and shorter part taking place 16 years before the other. This part was a little hard to follow on first watching, as the characters are dumped on you before they're introduced, so it's hard to figure out what's going on and who's doing it. But on a rewatch, when you can recognize them, it's clear, especially with the help of subtitles.

Part 2, however, is crystal clear from the beginning. It is essentially one long chase scene, though as there are breaks in the storytelling and the identities of chased and chaser do sometimes change, it could be called one chase scene after another. But it felt to me like one long chase scene. But a very exciting and well-paced one as well as clearly told. It wraps up very well, too. That the father and daughter, who have been the object of most of the chasing, are finally at ease with one another by the end, so much so that they're comfortable going off and doing separate things, was particularly heart-warming.

This movie is not for everyone (I wouldn't recommend it to B.), but for what it is it's a good one.

a guide

I wrote to Pat Murphy. I said we all liked her book, there was just one small error. She asked for more information. I sent her an explanation. Rather than being put off by this core dump, she thanked me for it and asked if she could copy my e-mail to another author who was interested. I said don't bother, I've put the whole thing online. Pass it along to anyone who's interested.

So here it is, "A Guide to Terms of Address for British Nobility." Let me know if there's anything wrong, or anything left out you think is necessary.

review redux

A few days ago, I reviewed a performance of Aleksey Igudesman's The Music Critic. I didn't like it very much. Today, Joshua Kosman slammed it more than I did.

Like me, he noted that it's "essentially the live-music version of" Nicolas Slonimsky's book The Lexicon of Musical Invective but without any credit to Slonimsky. But Kosman would go further than I would. He says that "to imply that [Beethoven's contemporaries] were buffoons for not understanding that music on first hearing is craven nonsense." No, what they're buffoons for is ludicrously inaaccurate denunciations of it. What's fair, if you don't understand the music, is to express your wonderment and bewilderment, like Berlioz's composition teacher who said that, at the end of the concert where he first heard Beethoven's Fifth, he went to put on his hat and could not find his head.

Imagine having that reaction to this now-best-known of all classical works! That's the kind of feeling I'd like to recapture.

Igudesman's subtext is that critics are only there to complain about music they don't like. Unfortunately in Kosman's case that is often correct. He'd rather spend a review complaining about Carmina Burana than judging whether it's a good performance whether he likes the work or not. I try not to do that.

Kosman left at intermission, judging that he wouldn't be missing anything worthwhile. He didn't. I stayed till just before the end, when I finally got fed up, and I could just as well not have gone at all for anything I got out of it.

books with erorrs

The Adventures of Mary Darling, Pat Murphy (Tachyon, 2025)

This book does to Peter Pan what Wicked does to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz: entirely deconstructs it. In this story, when the children disappear, their mother goes on a quest to find them. She's well-equipped to do so, having - it turns out - been with the Lost Boys in her youth; so was the children's father; so was Captain Hook. Captain Hook is a good guy, almost the only admirable male in the story. Peter is not a little boy who wouldn't grow up, but an entirely amoral and very dangerous though not entirely wicked spirit. That last is derivable from Barrie, but he doesn't emphasize it.

The first thing Mrs. Darling does is enlist the help of her Uncle John. That's John H. Watson, M.D., so his famous friend immediately jumps in. This book is a Sherlock Holmes story to which Holmes is entirely superfluous. He doesn't solve the mystery or do much of anything. In fact he's shown up as something of a patsy. Towards the end, there's some hasty backtracking by other characters in which they explain that Holmes is actually very talented in his limited sphere of expertise, but it is so very limited. The problem is that Holmes comes from a world with the same physical rules as our primary world, but he's stumbled into an alternate world with spirits and fairy dust in it, so his rules no longer apply but he doesn't know it.

The story actually made enjoyable reading, so where's the error? (Yes, I misspelled that deliberately above, damn you.) Murphy makes clear in the afterword that she aimed for historical accuracy in anything she didn't make up, but she made a huge clunker that fiction authors writing about British history make constantly, and that is ignorance of the nomenclature of British nobility. There's a character sometimes called Lady Hawkins and sometimes Lady Emily Hawkins. She can't be both at the same time. They mean entirely different things. "Lady" or "Lord" are not free-floating terms that can be used wherever you want. She is, like many wives of British peers at the time, an American heiress by origin, so she cannot be Lady Emily, which would make her the daughter of a high-ranking British peer, like the daughters of Lord Grantham in Downton Abbey, who are all Lady Firstname Crawley. That her husband is called both Lord Hawkins and Lord Robert Hawkins is equally impossible; if he is Lord Robert Hawkins, then his wife's proper style would be the bizarre but real Lady Robert Hawkins. (See Sayers' Busman's Honeymoon, where Harriet Vane, by now married to Lord Peter Wimsey, gives her style correctly as Lady Peter Wimsey.)

Victoria: A Life, A.N. Wilson (Penguin, 2014)

This is a readable and interesting book, so why is it filled with so many clunkers? On p. 166, Wilson says that Lord John Russell served as Foreign Secretary in the 1852 coalition headed by the Earl of Derby. No he didn't. He was Foreign Secretary in the following government, a coalition headed by the Earl of Aberdeen. Derby's government was not a coalition. Since Wilson goes on to tell us about Derby, this isn't just a glitch in name. On p. 192, Wilson says "A child was born to the marriage," but he had not told us who got married. Prince Albert died on December 14, 1861, as the text makes clear, but on p. 259, Wilson tells us that "A year on, in 1862, the Queen prepared herself for her first Christmas as a widow." Say there, Wilson, what day is Christmas?

impatient crash

Where the small access street to our development meets the main artery, there's a traffic light, and the exit direction of the small access street splits into two lanes.

Therein lies the rub, because the left lane of those two is a left-turn-only lane, clearly marked with an arrow on the pavement. That leaves the right lane, which has no markings, for both going forward and turning right.

I was in my car at the front of this lane, waiting at a red light, because I was going forward. Behind me was a U-Haul truck whose driver wanted to turn right. He thought I had to turn right too - which I could have done safely, had that been my intent - and got impatient. So - since there was nobody in the left lane - he decided to go around me.

At that moment the light turned green, and - not seeing this truck pulling this dangerous maneuver - I started to move forward. And he came around and clipped me, wrecking my left headlight cover and a bunch of other stuff. So, instead of saving 3 seconds, he wasted half an hour, because that's how long it took to settle things after we pulled over.

"Why didn't you go?" he asked me.

"The light was red," I replied.

"You could have turned right safely," he said.

"I wasn't turning right. I was going forward," I replied.

"Then you should have been in the other lane," he said.

"That's a dedicated left turn lane," I replied.

He then went over and looked at it, and what he thought after seeing the arrow on the pavement - which he could easily have seen when he was behind me - I don't know.

I got very angry with him and he responded by calling the police. The cops were bemused by what was a civil dispute, not a criminal matter, and mediated our exchange of information. One of the cops advised me not to get angry, with an implication that I did so as some kind of negotiating tactic. I said I expressed anger because I was angry. He said it wasn't a big deal, insurance will cover it.

Well, it won't. I have a large deductible, my insurance doesn't cover the cost of a rental car while mine is in the shop, and that doesn't count the nuisance and fuss of dealing with all this. My usual body shop has abruptly gone out of business, to my surprise, so I had to get the insurer to find another one on their approved list. I hope the insurer agrees that I wasn't responsible for this. That the other driver tried this tight going-around maneuver in a large truck is what seemed most to impress my insurance adjuster.

concert (sort of) review: San Francisco Symphony (sort of)

I heard an ad for this on the radio, and it sounded interesting: something called The Music Critic - ok, my latter-day profession, so I'm curious already - apparently some sort of one-man show starring John Malkovich, but at Davies, the SF Symphony hall.

It wasn't a one-man show. It was two men and an orchestra. Essentially it was a musically-illustrated version of Nicolas Slonimsky's Lexicon of Musical Invective, "written and conceived" by violinist/conductor Aleksey Igudesman, who conducted the SFS in various pieces while Malkovich, miked at a music stand with his script on it, read aloud critical denunciations of the composers over (and occasionally under) the music.

Not necessarily old ones, either (Slonimsky published his Lexicon in 1953), though there were a few classics, like Tchaikovsky calling Brahms "a giftless bastard" or César Cui's description of a Rachmaninoff symphony as the product of "a conservatory in Hell." (No credit to Cui, though, or to most of the other critics, and certainly not to Slonimsky for having thought of this idea first.)

But there were also newer ones, e.g. several claims that Beethoven is a barrier to contemporary appreciation of classical music, or even that he's unappreciable by LGBTQ+ people. At one point Malkovich read negative You Tube comments on Igudesman's videos, enabling Igudesman to respond with Max Reger's famous dismissal of criticism as if he, Igudesman, had thought of it - though, as it refers to paper, it makes no sense in an online context.

At the end, the program fell apart. Igudesman coaxed Malkovich into reading critical reviews of Malkovich's own stage performances, after which Malkovich left the stage and Igudesman announced he was going to play something evidently as a quick encore, but then Malkovich came back on stage to interrupt with incoherent critiques of the way Igudesman was playing. This was supposed to be funny but was witless and annoying. The second time it happened, I just got up and left. I'd had enough.

the evil dex

The late blogger Kevin Drum was under treatment for many years for multiple myeloma, which eventually killed him about a year ago. He wrote often about his medical adventures, and had particularly strong feelings about a medication he was on, a steroid named dexamethasone, which he called "the evil dex."

What exactly was evil about it he never made exactly clear, but it seems that it prevented him from sleeping, leaving him groggy all the time.

I do not have myeloma, but I have been taking intermittent courses of dexamethasone - one to four days each - and have to report differently. It doesn't seem to have caused any disruption in my sleep, which has actually been getting less disrupted lately, and though that may be because I was taking the dex in the mornings, I've had it in the afternoons with no further effect.

What it does cause is a spike in blood sugar, which has to be watched over carefully. And either it or some of the other medications I've been taking at the same time has been causing constipation, about which the less said the better.

mystery solved

At Corflu, where the banquet was catered at our hotel meeting room from a Puerto Rican restaurant nearby, I was pretty sure I'd been to that restaurant before. Having gotten home, I went to leave a review on Yelp and discovered that not only had I been there (nine years ago, a wonder I remembered it) but I'd reviewed it.

Had I checked my review, I could have been definite on something I was trying vaguely to recall during conversations at the banquet. The food line offered two kinds of plantains, green and sweet. What I recalled was getting a mixture and liking one but not the other, but I couldn't remember which one. Turned out that what I'd written back then was, "The fried green plantains were fairly dry and crunchy, the sweet ones far too intensely sweet and got over anything they touched."

That was in contrast to general opinion at the banquet, which is that the green ones were inedible while the sweet ones were quite good. (I didn't have either this time.)

convention report: Corflu 43

Although I still receive a few fanzines, I consider myself retired from fanzine fandom, which is pretty much why I hadn't been to a Corflu, the annual convention of that small and elitist fraternity, in 15 years. But this one was to be in Santa Rosa, easily accessible from home, and the membership list was full of people I knew and would like to see again. So why not.

It felt like I'd never left. Conversations were resumed without any hitch. Only the visuals were startling. Many of us, and I don't except myself from this, have aged so much as to be hardly recognizable at first after a long time gap. And the number of physical infirmities and mobility aids was impressive. It's a sign of the times that, when 14 of us headed out on a group expedition to the Charles M. Schulz Museum (which I'd been to before more than once, but it's an excellent museum well worth revisiting), we all qualified for the senior discount but one, and she was given it by courtesy.

The hotel was a comfy Marriott just outside of downtown, with plenty of restaurants within walking distance, though because of my dietary restrictions I refrained from joining in. But I did risk the convention banquet, which was catered at our hotel meeting room from a Puerto Rican restaurant nearby, a favorite of Rich Coad, the convention chair. I was able to nibble at the ground beef picadillo, and some seasoned rice and beans, all delicious. It was an excellent choice of venue, at least for all of us, and the convention was altogether superbly run, so kudos to Rich and all the committee.

Interesting programming, too, curated by Jeanne Bowman. A couple panels on Bay Area fannish history, one on the Magic Cellar, which as moderator Deb Notkin aptly described it, was a nightclub that felt like home to the fans who frequented it; I was lucky enough to be one of its denizens for the last year of its existence in 1977-8. And a panel on local fandom of the 80s, which while it paid notice to the local clubs, the Little Men and PenSFA, which I frequented, concentrated on a circle focused in San Francisco some of whose members I knew well but which as a group I had no connection with.

Panels also on contemporary fan editing and APAs. I haven't belonged to an apa in 20 years, so some of the discussion of their migration away from print was news to me. I agree with the general opinion that an online discussion community isn't an apa, but the production of apazines as PDFs and their distribution over email, saving both the expense and time of physical mail - especially for international members - seemed a good idea, despite a song by Sandra Bond poking fun at the whole idea of efanzines that was sung lustily at closing ceremonies.

Of lighter programming, charades based on fanzine titles was a little dubious, especially as many of the attendees, including those tasked to do the charading, hadn't heard of some of the titles, and having them be ones we recognized was the whole point. On the other hand, slam storytelling - you get the microphone for five minutes, tell an amusing anecdote from your life - worked very well. The convention theme was pickles, so the storytellers worked that in somehow. In only a couple cases did that involve physical pickled cucumbers, but all the rest told of being in a pickle. Mostly stories of travel or of animals, or both. Tom Whitmore and Karen Anderson's story of transporting pet cats by car was perhaps the most amusing.

The Guest of Honor, name picked out of a hat as customary, was Jerry Kaufman, and his GoH speech at the banquet, on the embarrassing circumstances long ago which is why he never gives speeches, could have been another entry in the previous evening's storytelling. Past president of fwa, an honorary position chosen by acclamation, was Jeanne Gomoll. Geri Sullivan and Pat Virzi showed around the current draft of a book of Corflu memorabilia they're editing. Next year's Corflu will be in Vancouver BC, run by some of the same people running this one plus sundry.

I had a good time. I picked up a bunch of interesting-looking fanzines. I'm glad I came. Health permitting, I should resume going more often.