decoined

Another reason I lost interest in coin collecting is the decreasing use of coins in our society. As recently as the end of the state quarters program in 2008 I would always have a fistful of coins in my pocket, and could search through any new arrivals for state quarters.

But now I rarely have coins at all, and I tend to decant any I get on arriving home. I just don't need them any more.

This is partly because of the decreasing value of coins. It's been years since you could buy anything, except maybe an hour on a parking meter in a low-congestion district - and they're mostly coin-free now - for a quarter. If you use coins at all, they're just markers on the way up to a greater value.

But just as much it's the move to cards. I was at the Freight & Salvage on Saturday for a concert by a Scottish folkish band called Gnoss (silent G) - it was all right, typical fiddle-driven fast music with occasional slower songs - and I stopped by the food counter for a snack. I picked up a bag of peanuts, $1.10 with tax. I remembered I had a dime in my pocket as well as a dollar bill, and I was reaching to pull them out when the clerk said "We're cards only." So, I now have a credit card charge for $1.10. Sheesh.

coined

My late grandfather was a coin collector in a small way. His usual technique for collecting was to sort through the coins in his pocket, looking for issues that he didn't already have. The oldest coin in his collection was an 1878 silver dollar, which I doubt he found in his pocket, but I don't know how much business with coin dealers he may have done. Probably not a lot. He kept his main US collection in Whitman coin folders, and none of them were complete.

He also had a miscellaneous box of foreign coins, which he'd picked up on world travels in his later years, and some varied currency notes of both US and foreign issue, as well as a number of US proof sets, mostly encased in plastic shells.

I showed some interest in this coin collection, and so when he was downsizing his possessions in the 1980s, he gave it to me. What I liked about collecting coins was the serried arrays they came in: otherwise identical coins with heads of presidents on them, marching down, distinguished only by year of issue and mint mark - mustn't forget the mint marks, of such vital interest to collectors. This is why I never got interested in collecting stamps. Though much prettier than coins, they didn't come in serried arrays.

For some time after receiving the collection, I kept it up by sorting through my own pocket change, but gradually I gave that up, mostly because the new clad coinage was less interesting than the old silver issues. My last spurt of interest came with the state quarter series of 1999-2008. I had great fun looking for those in my change - to my mind, buying one from a dealer would have been cheating - and eventually I got them all, and bought a folder to keep them in. But I discovered that collecting them had been more fun than having them. I rarely looked at the complete set, and if I was interested in the designs I can see them more clearly displayed on websites.

So now that I in turn am downsizing my possessions, I decided that selling the coins would be a good plan, a decision facilitated by my recent discovery that my once-keen eyesight had deteriorated in detail to the point where I couldn't read the mint marks and sometimes even the dates on the smaller coins. I once had a device that would magnify a coin but it never worked very well. If I were still interested in keeping up coin collecting I could look for a better one, but I'm not.

Just last week, then, an ad turned up in my mail that one of those antiques roadshow outfits would be setting up shop in a nearby hotel conference room for a few days to buy coins and jewelry. Perfect. I went down on the first morning to find it nearly empty: three buyers and no more than two other customers at a time (one of whom looked disconcertingly like the late Dave Rike). They carried the heavy box - which I'd put in the car in installments - in from the car and sorted through the contents. The buyer was especially pleased to find a couple of late 19C silver dollars with Carson City mint marks, plus an item my grandfather had been particularly proud of: an uncut sheet of six $5 bills of National Currency bank notes, series 1929. The buyer said this form of uncut sheets was rare. He paid a pretty penny for that and the lot of miscellaneous stuff, even taking my collection of aluminum tokens from the Shell gasoline presidents and states coin games from the 1970s. And so all that has found a home.

not just Cupertino

There's an article in the Mercury News, the local paper, on the effect that Apple Park, the giant ring-shaped "spaceship" headquarters, has had on the city of Cupertino, where it's located, since it was completed nearly a decade ago.

The thing is, though, that - though other cities are barely mentioned - it's not just Cupertino. Tax revenues - the small part that goes to cities - does indeed go to Cupertino and affect it. But housing prices and especially traffic have more effect on the neighboring cities.

Apple Park is located in a tab of Cupertino that sticks up to the north on the east side of the city. The houses immediately to the north and west of it are in Sunnyvale; the ones to the east are in Santa Clara. They're the ones most directly affected by Apple Park. There's a photo in the article of the spaceship looming up behind what the caption says is "a home on Lorne Way in Cupertino." Lorne Way isn't in Cupertino. It's a block north of the spaceship in Sunnyvale.

What is in Cupertino? The only housing in Cupertino in the immediate area is an apartment complex to the sw that was already there. My mother lived there at one time, but she was glad to be out before construction of Apple Park literally tore up the entire neighborhood.

South of the spaceship is its parking area, and behind that the freeway. On the other side of the freeway is a shopping district. There are homes in Cupertino not far away, but they're not directly under the spaceship's shadow, and access to the neighborhoods is mostly detached from the roads that Apple traffic backs up on.

I'd like to know more about what impact Apple Park has had on Sunnyvale - where I live, about a mile further west - and Santa Clara. But no, it's in Cupertino, we have to talk only about Cupertino.

concert review: Philharmonia Baroque

I don't often get to Philharmonia Baroque concerts, even when the traveling program does get down the Peninsula, which it doesn't always do. However, this one, which landed at the Concrete Tent in Palo Alto, I couldn't resist. It consisted of works by and inspired by C.P.E. Bach, and as C.P.E. (often called that to distinguish him from his colossal father J.S.) is one of my favorite 18C composers, I figured I had to go.

The C.P.E. work was No. 3 in F of his four Hamburg symphonies (Wq. 183), here being conducted by Philharmonia Baroque's former music director. It is, as the program notes point out, a quirky symphony both structurally and harmonically, but to my mind it's the tense and dark quality of the outer movements, a style called "Sturm und Drang" when other composers like Haydn took it up, though I suspect that C.P.E. invented it, that most appeals to me.

And this performance emphasized that. Led from the violin by guest conductor Shunske Sato (that is, though standing in front, he played along with the first violins for the whole concert, and let the orchestra pick up his directions from that), it was heavy, intense, even vicious, despite the small size of the orchestra.

Much the same quality was brought to the rarely-heard Mozart work, the entr'acts from his incidental music to the play Thamos, King of Egypt, and a bit even to Beethoven's Symphony No. 1, a work as quirky in form and harmony as C.P.E.'s symphony. The work that didn't quite fit this format was Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto in D Minor. This is the other Mendelssohn violin concerto, not the famous one, the one he wrote when he was only 12. It's partly like a Baroque concerto, evoking the generation before C.P.E., and partly like the Mendelssohn to come.

Anyway, a good concert.

so you want to vote for Steve Hilton?

I swear this was a coincidence. I was browsing through the memoirs of Margaret Thatcher and John Major, both of which I own and have read before, when I remembered that I'd never gotten around to reading the memoirs of their successor, David Cameron, though that was published seven years ago. So, having another errand in that direction, I went to the library and checked it out.

What's coincidence is that that same day I looked up all the major California gubernatorial candidates on Wikipedia to learn their background. Where I learned that Steve Hilton, one of the Republican candidates, though by now a U.S. citizen with something of a mid-Atlantic accent, started out as a Brit who was a political aide to David Cameron.

So what does his former boss have to say about Steve Hilton? Brace yourself:

Steve Hilton's ideas continued to be one part brilliant to several parts bonkers. However, his relationship with people in government wasn't working. He was no longer excused as a free spirit when he was late for meetings - he was seen as someone who had disregard for others. His antagonistic style was no longer helping him advance his cause - it had started to hurt it. And the relationship between the two of us became strained, too. Steve is a real ideologue in a way I'm not. He thought I was losing my radical zeal and falling for the trappings of prime minister. But I knew that to be a successful radical you have to play the game. And he wasn't interested in playing the game, just tipping it over and throwing the pieces all over the floor.

Michael Tilson Thomas

Well, it happened. Michael Tilson Thomas died yesterday. He'd been very ill and wound down his conducting career entirely a year ago, so it's not a surprise though it remains a tragedy. The San Francisco Symphony has announced that its performance of Beethoven's Ninth in June - led by the now-unavoidable James Gaffigan - will be dedicated to MTT's memory. That's appropriate, as the last time I heard him conduct was in Beethoven's Ninth in October 2023. He was scheduled to conduct another concert on my series later that season, but had to bow out due to frailty and illness. But his Ninth was well-appreciated. What I wrote at the time was:

Michael Tilson Thomas, music director laureate, returned to lead the SFS in the Big One, Beethoven's Ninth. What he did for SFS while stationed here was incalculable, and the love and affection that poured forth from audience and performers alike on his arrival onstage - and even more when the piece was over - was tremendous. The more so with his increasing health problems since his retirement, including a cancer operation two years ago that had him off work for months. If we never see him again, we want him to know that the last was the best. This was as fine and assured a Ninth as we've heard, particularly cherishable in a smooth and layered slow movement.

MTT served as music director of the SFS for 25 years (1995-2020), the longest service they've ever had, and he was probably the greatest director they've ever had, politely eclipsing Pierre Monteux, his predecessor in both distinctions. His arrival was announced with some hoopla, which turned out to be deserved. Taking up the orchestra rebuilding of his two immediate predecessors, he turned SFS into one of the world's great orchestras, and it's not fallen far since his departure, despite the crises of the last couple years. Beethoven's Ninth, which I think he led here several times, was one of his specialties; so was Stravinsky; so was American music when he could dub it as "maverick" whatever that means; so was Mahler, which I appreciated from him a lot less than from others. So it goes. I did appreciate him in a lot of other music, remembering especially some exquisitely burnished Sibelius, the Third in September 2016 and the Sixth in June 2018.

California gubernatorial debate

Matt Mahan: I'm the mayor of the third largest city in California!

Xavier Becerra: I've sued Donald Trump and won!

Katie Porter: I've sat down and talked with suffering Californians!

Tom Steyer: Let me repeat the question, slowly. Also, I'm the Change Agent!

Steve Hilton (or was it Chad Bianco?): All of California's problems are the result of Democrats running it for 16 years.

Chad Bianco (or was it Steve Hilton?): Yeah. Also, regulations are bad!

dentistry

Because I've been ill, my dentist requires before dental surgery of any kind - even something as non-intrusive as replacing a crown which fell out, my current concern - a verification from my physician that I'm OK for such procedures.

If you go through the medical center's formal procedure for such verifications, the medical records department will send out (with the patient's HIPAA approval) a long list of all the medical procedures you've undergone, but without anything saying that it's OK to go ahead. They're just the records department, after all, and apparently judging that your procedures aren't counter-indicative to dentistry is left to the dentist. But the dentist is no physician; how would she know?

Fortunately, my primary-care physician - who isn't actually much involved in my current treatment, though he's following its course - is willing to bypass the formal procedure and fill out the form himself. However, this time it took three attempts to fax it to the dentist before it came through.

Meanwhile, a pain while chewing, elsewhere in the mouth, is revealed as a probable fractured tooth, and a periodontist will have to look at it to see if it can be saved. It's three weeks until I see the periodontist, and another week before I get the temporary crown, so patience is a virtue.

book review

The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem, Julie Phillips (Norton, 2022)

I hadn't known that Julie Phillips - author of that fabulous biography of Alice Sheldon/James Tiptree - had published another book until I heard her mention it in the course of reading an entry from Ursula K. Le Guin's blog, an online project that's going to involve a lot of guest readers.

It's an analysis of how women writers and other creative artists have balanced their work and the practical job of being a mother, mostly illustrated by example. There's a full chapter on Le Guin, which is why I immediately sought this book out. Phillips is working on Le Guin's biography, and this is the third article I've read of hers on that subject, all written with the same assuredness and insight into character that characterized her Tiptree book.

Each of the featured subjects took an entirely different approach to the problem addressed by the book. Phillips describes Le Guin's method as separating out her two jobs. Once her children were in school, she could write during the day, and taking care of the children and household tasks the rest of the time could be handled because, while her husband had a full-time job, when he was at home he was fully involved in household tasks. For instance, he took the children to all their appointments because Ursula didn't drive. She writes that, while one person can't do two jobs, two people can do three.

The other full-chapter subjects are the writers Doris Lessing, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Angela Carter, and the painter Alice Neel. Interstitial chapters bring in other subjects, including the likes of Susan Sontag, Margaret Atwood, and Shirley Jackson whom I'd like to have read more about. Unfortunately there's no index to enable the reader to dig these nuggets out.

concert review: San Francisco Symphony

Simone Young, from Australia, guest conducted. So was the living composer - from Australia, I mean. 35-year-old Ella Macens offered The Space Between the Stars, depicting what it's like to lie on the ground at night and contemplate the titular view. Unsurprisingly, the music offered sheens and broad melodies, often for strings, sometimes over quiet pulsations. Despite a few Ligeti-like chords, it was mostly so intensely consonant as to resemble movie music more than anything contemporarily classical.

Gautier Capuçon soloed in the Cello Concerto No. 1 of Camille Saint-Saëns, a brief work in one movement in ABA form, where the B section is a charming Tchaikovsky-like chipper waltz.

Lastly, about an hour of "bleeding chunks" as they're called, orchestral excerpts from Wagner's Ring, also including the Siegfried Idyll, which is not part of the Ring cycle although many apparently think it is. Apparently the titular opera doesn't have any bleeding chunks worth excerpting, although the other three in the cycle certainly do, so Young put this in instead. Wagner is much better as a tone-poem composer than he ever was writing operas, though his tendency to beat the listener over the head with his Leitmotivs remains irritating in any form.

concerts review: two quartets

Two of SF Performance's chamber music series wound up in the same week, and as a subscriber I got to both of them. The Danish String Quartet on Tuesday had an interestingly unusual program: first, their own arrangement of Stravinsky's Suite italienne, which in turn was Stravinsky's own arrangement for violin and piano of excerpts from his Pulcinella ballet music. This came out very Stravinskian. Then, Alfred Schnittke's Quartet No. 2, four movements of unending extreme dissonance, some of it Very Loud, some of it Extremely Quiet, and strangely captivating throughout. A lot of composers who like being dissonant could learn from this how to do it effectively. Lastly, a series of pleasant Nordic folk songs and dances, mostly Danish and Faroese, though when it was announced that one piece was from Greenland, the audience broke out into spontaneous applause.

Quatuor Ébène on Thursday was a more conventional program of 3 canonical 19C quartets by Beethoven (Op. 18/2), Debussy (his only), and Brahms (Op. 51/2). For an encore, a bit more daring, Britten's Divertimento No. 2. All were played in a style very typical of their composer. This worked well with the Beethoven, his most lively and perky quartet, but though the sound quality in the Debussy and Brahms was pretty awesome, they were rather duller to listen to. This is the sort of thing that stood in the way of my appreciating string quartets for a long time.

A big shutdown of the approaches of the Bay Bridge for repairs this weekend is already being prepared for, and driving out of the City at night was difficult both evenings even if you weren't going in that direction.

women composers

Having poured praise over Caroline Shaw in my last post, I want to say a little about women composers in general. Last week, Joshua Kosman (bottom part of this post) reported on a performance of Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel's only string quartet, which he found "phenomenal ... ingenious, hearty and often ravishingly beautiful."

Maybe he heard a particularly good performance, because I've heard this work and found it an OK composition, creative enough and particularly delightful for its scherzo, but it's sometimes rote and a little thin on the development side, certainly not, as some YouTube commenters on its recording have claimed, a match for the quartets by her brother Felix.

Hensel is one of a number of women composers of the past whose work has been resurrected and promoted specifically because they're important composers who have been neglected up until recently. I've heard a lot of this stuff, and I can say that, of the pre-20th century composers (I'll get to the 20th and 21st ones later), that many of them are perfectly good second-level composers, but with the exception of Hildegard of Bingen, none are a match for the best male composers of their time.

Why is that? Is it because, as is sometimes stated, "men are better composers than women"? Of course not. You can't classify an entire sex that way. Most men can't compose worth a jot, and mediocre male 18th century composers are heard every day on KDFC radio. It might be more accurate to say that the best composers of the pre-20C period are men, but again, why is that?

It isn't because the best women lack genius. I'll demonstrate their talent later. It's lack of opportunity. The kind of musical training, and even more the chance to put it to use and develop your talent, was only spottily available in pre-modern times. It was hard enough for men to get it, and it's luck as well as an eagerness to learn that was responsible for its landing on as many male geniuses as it did. For women it was even tougher, and it's a tragedy that no female genius of those days got the opportunity to show her talent. Because they must have been there, somewhere. Mute inglorious Miltons, the lot of them.

Even the ones who did get training were somehow stifled. My understanding is that both Hensel's brother and her husband encouraged her to compose, but she wrote very little. Not only did this deprive us of much to judge her talent by, but it also robbed her of the job of working at her art and developing it to become a better composer.

An even clearer case is that of Clara Schumann. Her best work that I've heard is a Piano Trio in G Minor that she wrote in her mid-20s, and that is up to the quality of comparable works by her husband Robert. But she never followed up on it: no more chamber ensemble pieces followed from her pen. Earlier on, she had written a piano concerto, but that was in her early teens, and the best that can be said of it is that you admire the composer's talent but hope that she grows up fast. It's not surprising that such a young composer's work is immature; even Mozart wasn't writing immortal masterpieces at that age. (Clara Schumann did embark on a second piano concerto in her late 20s; she didn't get very far, but the movement she completed is much better than its predecessor.) Being the mother of many children and the wife of a difficult man may have had its effects, and when she was older and freer she might have felt herself just out of practice. Whatever the cause, it's a shame; she was the best of them.

Turning to American composers, a lot of attention has been focused recently on Amy Beach. She wrote some good music, especially in her later years - her string quartet is particularly fine - but much of the music she's known for strikes me as dull and rather routine. She's no better, albeit also no worse, than her male compatriots in the Second New England School, and she doesn't deserve to be feted while the men are mostly ignored, just because she's a woman.

After Beach, chronologically, come Rebecca Clarke and Ruth Crawford, whom I find it hard to judge because I don't much care for their idiom, but they appear to be somewhat better.

But to my mind the first great American woman composer is Florence Price, the Black woman who flourished in Chicago in the 1930s. Compared to the flurry of white male American composers who were coming to prominence at the same time - most of whom were a decade or more younger than she - she wasn't as brilliant as Copland or Barber, but she was every bit the equal of the rest of them - Cowell, Piston, Sessions, Harris, Hanson, Thomson and Thompson (yes, there were two of them, just like in Tintin). These are all (well, except Sessions) composers I like a lot, and Price's symphonies, concertos, and chamber music are just as appealing.

And since then, the list of great women composers has only grown. Can there be any doubt that it's greater opportunities for them to be trained and get performed and learn thereby that has been responsible? When I list the great composers of today, more than half of them are women. Caroline Shaw, Anna Clyne, Jennifer Higdon, Gabriela Lena Frank, Lera Auerbach, Jessie Montgomery, Missy Mazzoli, and more; even lesser-knwon ones like Belinda Reynolds and Stefania de Kenessey, not to mention deceased 20C composers like Price and Grazyna Bacewicz, Galina Ustvolskaya and Sofia Gubaidulina. Women's talent is out there, and always was; it just didn't get the chance to express itself. Blame the more virulent sexism of the past, not any lack of female genius.

concert review: Attacca Quartet

This was something special.

Taking place in the smaller theater on the top floor of the SF building whose main venue is the Herbst, it consisted of a single 90-minute set of string quartet music by Caroline Shaw. For three pieces which were art songs in format, Shaw herself - a founding member of the vocal ensemble A Roomful of Teeth - came onstage and provided the vocals.

I first heard of Shaw in 2013 when she won the Pulitzer Prize for a vocal piece she'd written for her ensemble. I heard it and was quite taken with the bold but winning composition. I began looking forward to and seeking out her music. I've heard some of the pieces at this concert - "And So," "The Evergreen," "Valencia" - before.

But I hadn't heard the Attacca Quartet play them. They're so taken with Shaw's music they'd be happy if they could arrange to play nothing else. They took a strong and precision-oriented approach to this music, which served well its intricacies and cutting edges, but was perhaps not always the best approach for conveying the emotional winningness of the music. But it was always vividly arresting. The most striking moments came in "Blueprint," which features frequent fortissimo unified attacks after long pauses. These were always, uniformly, precisely aligned so that all four players were as one. A lot of good ensembles can't do that.

Elsewhere, though, squeaking the bow across the strings was striking the first time it happened, but after twenty repetitions I'd had enough. This was the only time I've ever gotten tired of what Shaw was writing. The precision uniformity of Attacca's approach didn't help here.

I find Shaw's music to have wholeness and healing in it despite a style emphasizing stuttering and fragmentation. If this concert didn't emphasize those first qualities, it was nevertheless an arresting and exciting performance of a lot of music by one of the finest composers currently out in the world.

I arrived in the City early enough to attend half of a free certificate recital by a student at the SF Conservatory. This was up in the recital hall near the top of the Conservatory's new high-rise, which I hadn't been in before. The glass wall behind the players provides a striking north view of the dome of City Hall. Anyway, the student was Ruisi Doris Du, playing on viola an arrangement of one of Bach's cello suites. It was a bit stiff and formal, characteristic of people less than seasoned professionals playing Bach, but as far as I could tell she was completely technically adept. B., who plays viola herself, would have enjoyed it, but she's not going all the way up to the City for a viola recital.

Unfortunately time pressure meant I couldn't stay for the second half, which featured Rachmaninoff (also an arrangement from cello) and Rebecca Clarke (not).

updating credit

My new credit card came yesterday. This was slightly unexpected because the old one doesn't expire for two months. It was also noteworthy, because this is the card I use for all my online transactions, including recurring charges. That meant I had to go online and update them all, with the new expiration date and (where they stored it) the 3-digit thingie that supplements the card number for verification. (While the card number stays the same, the 3-digit thingie - I forget what it's called - changes with each reissue, but fortunately my new one is memorizable.)

And that proved a bit of a challenge. I don't keep a list of the recurring charges, but since they are recurring I can find them on my bill. First stop was my web and e-mail hosting service; that was pretty easy. The next one was unrelated to it, but I found it had somehow picked the change up from the web service.

After that, however, came a bunch where I was dashed if I could find the page to make a credit card change on. If I did eventually stumble on the page of links that included it, it was easily identifiable, but stumbling upon that page was a doozy. At one site I typed in a help search box "how do I update my credit card" and it instructed me to find the link on a particular page, but it didn't say how to find that page. Typing a query on how to find that page produced no useful results.

Then there was my gym membership, which I don't use any more. I was just going to let it run out with the credit card, but I decided to try to contact them online or by phone. Ha-ha, you can't do that, though the online instructions say you can. The phone number, which the online system assures you can reach membership services, asks for your member number, confirms this, and then says goodbye and hangs up. It says elsewhere you can visit your local club. Well, ha-ha, my local club has been closed - news to me, but I told you I didn't use it any more. My membership was only good there, so I doubt I can get anything done at some other outlet. Maybe I'll just let it run out with the credit card - assuming it hasn't picked up the update, but I don't have an online account there, so I can't check.

thoughts while reading

the April 6 New Yorker

1. Here's some info: The scientist who invented the term "alpha male," who was studying chimpanzees, used it to mean "not necessarily the strongest or most intimidating but, rather, the ones who excelled at coalition-building," keeping the peace and consoling. He was very annoyed at it being applied to humans who were, in his word, bullies.

2. Why are people finding it so difficult to grasp that one can support Israel while opposing the policies of its current government? That's my position regarding the United States as well.

concert review: Catalyst Quartet and friends

I've heard a lot from the Catalyst Quartet at SF Performances in recent years. A while ago they did a whole series of concerts of the work of Black composers, for instance.

Tuesday's was kind of different. The main item on the program was the song cycle Sea Pictures by the canonical Englishman, Edward Elgar, with the original orchestral accompaniment arranged for piano quintet. Terrence Wilson at the keyboard joined the Quartet. The singer was Nikola Printz, whose dark mezzo unleashed a lot of power when Elgar called for it, but pompous grandeur and drama are not the highlights of this cycle. Elgar was at his best being coy and charming in the two best settings in the bunch, "In Haven" and "Where Corals Lie," where Printz's voice could be surprisingly intimate.

Now watch the chain of connections (not the order in which the pieces were played in the concert). A suite for quartet, Fantasiestücke by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, something of a protégé of Elgar's. Coleridge-Taylor was Black, and when he visited the U.S. he met with Henry Burleigh, the Black pupil of Antonín Dvořák who introduced Dvořák to Afro-American spirituals, which inspired the Largo of Dvořák's New World Symphony. So we got Printz singing a setting of "Going Home," the spiritual that was later made out of the theme of that Largo, and (for quartet) the Sorrow Song and Jubilee by the contemporary Libby Larsen, a tribute to Burleigh and Dvořák incorporating fragments from another spiritual, "Swing Low Sweet Chariot." From her program notes, Larsen evidently thinks Dvořák incorporated "Going Home" into his symphony rather than the other way around.

It was a bit of a challenge in my current state going up to the City for a concert (and I have five more in the next week, so I'd better gird myself), but this one for all its oddity turned out to be worthwhile.

from the moon

Some of those photos the Artemis II crew have sent back from the far side of the Moon are really impressive. (Too bad none of the Apollo 8 astronauts, who first explored that region, are still alive to see it.) Too bad, also, that we can't just sit back and enjoy it, but have to deal with a maniac at the same time.

Eatster

Quiet Easter with B's family at her nephew L's house. His sister T, our usual hostess, is recovering from an arm injury and decided to pass. There's only so far that being Super Mom can take you.

That did mean that T's friends who usually enliven our gathering weren't present, so it was just family and their ailing dad's caretaker. Moderate amount of food. I made my cashew broccoli, discovering that it will reheat nicely instead of having to be cooked on the spot. Asparagus soup, made by L's wife E, was the treat I liked the most.

Afterwards B and E, mostly, put together a fairly simple jigsaw puzzle. We got home in time to feed the cats before they began meowing too loudly.

This morning, equally quiet when I went to the grocer's to pick up some blueberries, B's favorite which somehow got left out of our pickup order last week. I guess everybody's still sleeping off their Eastern dinner.

Tolkien Society awards

The finalists for the Tolkien Society awards have come out. I'm not linking because either you're already a TS member and have access, or you're not and it's of no concern to you. I was on the panel for Best Book (scholarly), as I was last year, and this year my choices were rather different from the rest of the panelists'. As a result, only two of the books I voted for made it to the five-item shortlist, and the other three are ones I didn't vote for, two of which I emphatically wouldn't have voted for. Meanwhile, three books I thought as good as the other two didn't make it. It's frustrating: there's not a one among my five that I didn't find flaws in, but they were also all blisteringly insightful, whereas the two I wouldn't have voted for seemed to be scrounging around trying to find something worthwhile to say. I won't identify any of these; if you're a voter read them for yourself and see what you think.

to the moon

So NASA has launched its Artemis II rocket to carry four astronauts on a non-orbital lunar flyby. I was a little startled by the news that this has actually launched, because the news on it has been very subdued. For something that's intended mainly as a publicity stunt, that's doing it wrong. Have there, for instance, been profile articles on the individual astronauts? Not in the news sources I read.

Leaving aside the question of whether this is what we should be spending our money on - a question raised with just as much urgency over the first lunar program - what most concerns me is a point raised by Jared Isaacman, the NASA director. He said it's not a successful mission until they safely splash down. He's right, and the same was said about the first lunar-era missions as well. But it was NASA's extreme operational competence which made those missions run mostly properly, and which saved the astronauts the not once (Apollo 13) but twice (Gemini 8) that equipment failure created potentially deadly situations. It's been over 50 years since we last sent a lunar mission, and since then we've twice lost crews in space, which never happened in the first lunar days. A lunar mission is a proposition of extreme risk requiring precision handling. Has NASA recovered its extreme competence? If the Artemis crew return safely, it probably has: it won't be just luck that gets them back. Let's hope they do.

April the first of summerfilth

Apart from reading a couple pieces about April Fool's, I managed to get through the whole day without experiencing any, for which I was grateful. Of course I spent the entire afternoon plugged in at the medical clinic, so there's that.

It's the first night of Pesach, and I've received some greetings for that, for which I am also grateful. For the occasion, I made matzo ball soup for dinner, and for a wonder the weather was cool enough to make this a seasonally appropriate meal.

And that was the first full day of my new year.