errands of the day

1. Picking up a prescription renewal at the hospital pharmacy. They've given up the policy of only handing out a half-prescription if you pick up a renewal in person, which was intended to encourage patients to use mail-order. I prefer in-person when I can, partly because it's faster (a relevant point if on the verge of running out), and partly because of the strange things our mail carriers sometimes do when they find the package won't fit through the mail slot.

2. Unsuccessful search for a Goodwill donation truck. The nearby shopping center that used to have one is now under construction, and the truck is gone. Goodwill's web site shows a truck at another nearby shopping center, but there is no truck.

3. Post office, to mail little holiday packages to B's numerous relatives. I offered to let the woman behind me in line at the self-service machine, who had only one package and who also had a squirming toddler, go ahead of me, but she didn't understand what I was talking about (possibly an ESL problem). So I just tried to work quickly. The toddler stood underneath and gazed up quizzically as I did so.

4. Dentist, for a cleaning and checkup appointment postponed from when I had a cold. As I sat there being buzzed at, the inhouse sound system was playing jazz versions of the Nutcracker Suite and Peer Gynt. Not just an arrangement, but an alteration of the notes and their value and pitch and number: jazzing it up. Look, I kept wanting to say, if you don't like the Nutcracker then don't play it, but there's no need to demonstrate your disdain by mucking around with it like that.

5. To market, to market, to buy a little chicken to cook for tonight's dinner, made with a delicious but (alas) discontinued curry sauce I found at one of the upscale grocers.

And so, stomachs satisfied (the cats' too, at least momentarily), to the computer for the evening perusal.

works with short titles

Movie: The Help. Less of a "see what a noble white person I was" story than I'd feared. The black women are individuals, tell their own stories, and get credited with them. One thing puzzles me. If the whites were really as paranoid about contacting black germs and diseases as depicted here - something I haven't seen in any previous discussions I've read of classic Southern white racism - then why did they let black servants prepare their food and handle their babies? Especially if, as the movie's chief racist character puts it, it's all to protect the children?

Book: Ash by Malinda Lo. First novel by our new Mythcon GoH, so it's about time I read it. Well-written and interesting to read. The first half is a novelization of most of the Cinderella story, up through the point that the stepsisters start going out to balls without her. Like all good fairy tale novelizations, it fleshes out the story: for instance, the cruel stepmother is still cruel, but is given reasonable motivation for her behavior. No traditional fairy godmother; instead, Scottish border ballad-type Quendi lurk eerily around the background; one of these (male) will take on the traditional role, with ominous overtones that blow away in a puff. The second half veers suddenly off into a tender first-love lesbian romance story, with Cinderella courted by a royal huntress, a woman not much older than herself but, until the very end, far more mature. No sex, but lots of horses. The famous ball becomes just an incident, with the prince pushed to the sidelines: he's intrigued by Cinderella, but when she disappears, he shrugs and marries someone else. OK, you can tell this story this way if you want to; the world has room for a number of things.

seeking Seattle transportative enlightenment

The Potlatch web page says that "the handy new light rail ... doesn't go quite as far as the Hotel."

And the light rail's web page shows the line going only as far as the Westlake station, which is at Fourth and Pine.

Google Maps, however, appears to show light rail continuing up Westlake Avenue as far as the lake and then turning east, with the last station at Fairview and Ward.

However, the light rail project website shows an under-construction extension going not in that direction at all, but heading up Pine towards Capitol Hill.

Is the Google Maps extension a phantom, or what?, and will I get in trouble with all the Google apologists again if I suggest that their maps are not perfect in every way?

concert review: Boston Symphony

Of all the other great American orchestras that the San Francisco Symphony has invited to town on the occasion of its centennial, the Boston Symphony is the only one currently without a music director (or regular chief conductor in the case of Philadelphia, which has spent several years pretending it doesn't have a music director), as the artistically acclaimed but illness-plagued James Levine finally faced reality and resigned a few months ago.  To lead them on this tour, the BSO brought in Levine's former assistant Ludovic Morlot, the new music director in Seattle.

I'd never heard Morlot's work before.  For that matter, I'd never heard the BSO in person either (they were off the one time I've been in Boston during the season), so this concert turned out to be a chance to confirm why I've never been particularly fond of their recordings.  They sound really nice, but they lack drive and direction.

Berlioz' Roman Carnival Overture opened the concert and illustrated this.  It was less pointlessly meandering than some performances, and a few transitional passages really did pick up and go for a few moments, but it didn't truly shape itself.  The main impression left was the astonishing smoothness of the strings, pure and silky without any overlushness.  The winds were more pungent and sounded at times as if they came from a different orchestra.

This approach led to predictable results when applied to a fat Mozart piano concerto like K. 503.  Richard Goode was soloist and played with the same plush tones as the strings.  It was very beautiful and it went absolutely nowhere.

Elliott Carter's Flute Concerto.  Twitter, twitter, twitter, twitter, twitter.

Bartok's Miraculous Mandarin suite was particularly sad because it's loud and ferocious and requires the orchestra to play with demonic passion, and they did, but it just didn't add up to anything.  A lot of sound and fury signifying, you know.  I heard the Vienna Philharmonic play this earlier this year, and anybody else trying it in their wake is going to be sorry.

What I did enjoy was the encore, one of the shortest encores on record.  Morlot remembered why the BSO had been invited and led them in Igor Stravinsky's version of "Happy Birthday To You", a thoroughly Stravinskified metamorphosis that resembles the original no more than a Frank Gehry structure resembles a building.  Fun to listen to and very brief.

piano moove-cow

For the last 22 years or so, B. and I have been living with a piano. A beat-up old ex-school upright with old student carvings all over it and a top lid falling off, whose interior works are nevertheless in remarkably good condition, made by the Howard Piano Company, of Cincinnati. One of B's sisters had acquired it for something like $25. B. uses it to practice church music on, and sometimes to play for fun. I noodle on it occasionally or use it to sound out harmonies in scores that I'm studying.

B's mother also had an upright piano, made by the Conover Piano Company, of Chicago. It does not have a school in its history, so it's in much better exterior shape. We've inherited it from her estate, with the intention of finding a home for old Howard. It turned out that the music director at B's old church knew someone who wanted a cheap piano for her children to practice on.

So the match was made. The next step was making the plans, which included finding a feasible date for everyone involved and hiring a mover; thus all the phone calls I made last week. The movers were, of course, extremely interested in the size and shape of the instruments involved, which is how I learned that there are uprights, and there are uprights. This chart, though it is not from the movers we ultimately chose, illustrates the point. The Conover is a console upright, second class in the upright family. Old Howard is from the third class, and after seeing this chart I understood why, when I gave its height, the movers always asked if it had any player-piano works inside; they wanted to make sure that it wasn't of the fourth class, saloon pianos, which are much heavier.

This morning was the big day, absolutely packed with logistics. B. was at work, so I dealt with it all, driving early over to the senior center where her mother had lived. I'd been there before, but I had a very short time to clear some space in the still-cluttered apartment and to make myself into a momentary expert in the locations and workings of the delivery gates, back doors, gate openers et al, before the movers came.

After they did their thing, it was back to our home, out with the old and in with the new, watched by cats with "wtf?" expressions on their faces. Signed invoice, paid, phoned the mom with the piano-practicing kids to alert her to incoming arrival. Got another call from her half an hour later, confirming that Old Howard had arrived, and adding, "I'm admiring the carvings."

Tolkien reconstructed

Adam Gopnik is one of those tiresome people who feel conspicuously guilty for liking Tolkien and wish they didn't.  Not surprisingly, then, his article in the December 5 New Yorker comparing Tolkien with his epigone (as the table of contents puts it, with refreshingly honest criticism) Christopher Paolini, is sophomoric, full of insights and clueless ignorance both in full measure.  It deserves a thorough commentary, and here it is.  Brace yourselves; this is going to be long.

1st p., "At Oxford in the 1940s ..."

Nasty of him to cite as proof of Tolkien's and Anglo-Saxon's boringness Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, two highly intelligent men who a) were pure modernists in their thinking, with no empathy with older modes at all, and b) affected a sort of lowbrow common-man ignorant mulishness in their literary judgments.  Ask W.H. Auden or Robert Burchfield about it and you'd get a totally different answer.

2nd p., "It is still one of the finest ..."

Gopnik is out of date if he thinks current fantasy literature is still an annex of Tolkien.  The day of Tolclones like Brooks and Donaldson and Eddings was over decades ago now.  Current top fantasists like George Martin are not trying to replicate Tolkien's spirit at all, well or poorly.  Their work has nothing to do with his beyond a medievalized imaginary-land setting, a world-shattering crisis, and keeping magic in the background rather than in front.  To the extent that Paolini is a Tolclone, he's an atavism today.

3rd-5th p.

Gopnik is absolutely right that the mixture of the homely hobbits and the vast Nordic background is what makes LOTR (and The Hobbit) work.  It's unfortunate that he thinks that the hobbit-less Silmarillion is "dull as dishwater."  For one thing, many readers disagree, especially ones who've come to it since its publication (as opposed to those who spent years expecting its appearance) and who were thus without LOTR-based expectations of its nature.  Gopnik's flat dismissal shows none of the charity that he expresses towards the wretched Paolini.  For another thing, if he'd actually read the Silmarillion, which apparently he hasn't, he wouldn't make some of the LOTR-based generalizations about Tolkien's thought of the next paragraph.

6th p., "Modernist ambiguity ..."

This one needs a lot of unpacking.  First off, Gandalf and Aragorn do express inner doubts, if "inner doubts" can be held to cover despair over whether they have the inner strength to carry on, or the wisdom to choose the best course to advance the cause in which they believe.  What they don't have doubts about is whether they've chosen the right side, but why should they?  I do not recall ever having read of any Allied generals in WW2 expressing inner doubts in the form of wondering if they should be fighting for the Nazis instead.  That was straightforward evil, and they were just not tempted.  Similarly, Gandalf and Aragorn recognize evil when they see it, and have made a conscious decision not to take any action that would lure them down that course.

In the real world, Tolkien was fully aware that the evilness of the Nazis did not make the leaders of the Allies entirely virtuous, or excuse misdeeds by the soldiers on their side.  This is clear from reading his letters.  (Has Gopnik read them?)  There is little of this to be found among the heroes in LOTR, though there are hints of it, in particular undercurrents of mutual hostility among the allied parties.  (One of Tolkien's themes is that goodness is culturally diverse, and thus sometimes mutually uncomprehending.)  But there are three more things to be noted here.  First, that he is always clear that virtue consists of actually being virtuous; it is in no way inherent in the white hats that the heroes wear.  They are the good guys only so long as they actually remain good.  (Denethor and Boromir are there to show what happens if they don't.)  Misdeeds are not excusable, but perilous.  Second, that the purity of the heroes, to the extent that it is unrealistic, comes from the fact that Tolkien is writing a romance, not a realistic novel, a point Gopnik already made earlier.  A large part of LOTR's appeal comes from the craving in our fallen world for a story about real, genuine, unsullied virtue.  We don't have it but we need it, and its presence marks the vast gap separating LOTR from such fantasy series as George Martin's, where nobody is virtuous, or even very nice, and if they try they get killed quickly.  It needs also to be noted in this connection that Gandalf and Aragorn, who in Tolkien's book (but not in Jackson's movies) already went through and survived any crisis of choice before the story started, are not the chief protagonists of LOTR.  LOTR's protagonists are Frodo and Sam - unmentioned as individuals by Gopnik, by the way, which suggests he has no idea where the center of the story lies.  From a character function analysis point of view, the purpose of Gandalf and Aragorn in the story is to serve as models for Frodo and Sam to look up to and try to emulate.  That's where the rubber of the humble hobbits really meets the road of the heroic background; that's what the feature that Gopnik praises is there for: normal folks facing stark challenges of moral virtue, who can see what's at stake.

The third point is that if Gopnik really wants characters who are torn and conflicted, who commit evil deeds in what they consider a noble and righteous cause, and who think their nobility and righteousness excuses them, he ought to read that supposedly dull book the Silmarillion.  Tolkien's least remarked virtue as an author is an absolute genius at showing situations in which no course is righteous, all are flawed and fraught with moral as well as practical peril, and no character is either a straw man of wrongness or a mouthpiece for the author; all have legitimate points and also express blindness towards others' legitimate points.  It's all terribly sad, and terribly real, and - as a work of art - terribly beautiful.  -- And, not incidentally, knowledge of this history is the fuel that feeds the determination of Gandalf and Aragorn, and even more that of Galadriel, who experienced all this personally, to avoid falling into those traps of self-righteous justification in LOTR.  The Elves have been there and done that, and they are chastened by the experience and are not going to do it again.

Now, back to LOTR and Gopnik's points about the morally ambiguous and evil characters.  First off, he has committed the common error of confusing the moral clarity of the situation with the moral status of the characters.  In LOTR it is always clear what is good and what leads to evil.  Characters, however, shift, and it's more than the occasional character as Gopnik says.  Both Saruman and Wormtongue were once virtuous and fell into evil.  (So, we are told, was Sauron, though we never see him as other than evil; there are, however, hints in the Silmarillion as to how he got that way.)  Boromir and Denethor are in the process of falling.  Gopnik doesn't discuss any of these.  He does mention Gollum, who is in the opposite situation of a character already fallen into evil, who is (sometimes) trying to climb out, but fails.  Gopnik is quite misleading in stating that Gollum teeters over self-interest rather than conscience.  Gollum is engaged in a literal argument with himself, his narrow greedy self-interest vs. his enlightened self-interest, that which will help others and save himself, and the latter is his conscience.  As for the generals of Mordor failing to reflect on duty vs. morality, well, we hardly ever see the generals of Mordor close-up doing much of anything.  LOTR is not a story about exploring the depths and nature of evil.  It's a story about the depths and nature of good, a much harder thing to write and accordingly much less often seen.  But though we don't see the reflections of the generals, we do, in a few scenes among the orcs, see the reflections of the evil infantry, and, as Tom Shippey pointed out in a brilliant paper, what we see is the boundless cognitive dissonance of people who can do what's evil by their own moral standards and never notice it.  They're not reflective; they're blind to their own follies; and looking at much of the evil in the world today, that seems a lot more common.

7th p., "What substitutes for psychology ..."

Here again Gopnik expresses well the sense of loss that Tolkien is able to convey to the reader, even the reader who doesn't know the thing that was lost.  He also mentions Tolkien's sense of history, though as I've suggested he doesn't understand it.  He also mentions the almost complete absense of what he calls "lust".  Well, yes, sexual lust is pretty much absent from LOTR; it's all too present in the vast majority of fiction, and it's a relief to take a break.  (Again, if Gopnik wants some of that, he should read the Silmarillion.)  But the guys who cataloged the seven deadly sins will tell you that sexuality is not the only form of lust, and lust for power, for immortality, for sheer personal possession, is all over LOTR.

8th p., "To see the road not taken ..."

Lin Carter was the first genre fantasy critic to state outright that The Once and Future King is a masterpiece where LOTR, whatever its virtues, is not.  But again, not everybody agrees.  OFK, in its final, hastily put together and rewritten form (it's actually very different from its previously published constituent parts), is a misshapen, off-balance book that lacks the courage of its own convictions.  One of the commenters in the MythSoc list discussion of this article calls OFK a desecration and hatchet job on the Arthurian mythos, and criticizes its heartlessness and the anachronisms that both date it and ruin any consistency of subcreation.  I wouldn't criticize it that harshly myself; I think it's a very fine book, but it does have serious flaws and is not a match for LOTR in quality.  What it does well, it does well indeed; but that is not a better thing than what LOTR does well.

At the end of the paragraph, Gopnik delivers himself of the stunning remark that "a Tolkienesque treatment [would focus] on clashes between armies."  That is true only if by "Tolkienesque" he means "characteristic of cheap, ignorant LOTR imitators," not of LOTR itself.  In LOTR, the clashes between armies are actually the sideshow, and if you don't get this, you don't get LOTR.  The real story is the quest of Frodo and Sam, the characters Gopnik never mentions.

10th p., "It is no insult ..."

Again Gopnik fails to note a major difference between Tolkien and Paolini.  Eragon is the hero of Paolini's book, while his equivalent Aragorn is not the hero of Tolkien's.  (Frodo and Sam again.  You see why it's so significant that Gopnik doesn't mention them?)  The other equivalences he mentions are, I trust it's clear, surface features.  Lastly: Tolkien doesn't "practice guilt by phoneme."  Gaah.  The idea that harsh or sibilant consonants are evil in Tolkien fails to consider Dwarvish, and to the extent that it is true, the sounds, like some of the color symbolism, are an aesthetic preference and a marker for the presence of evil, not the evidence of guilt.  It's really moronic to get this backwards.

14th p., "In one moment ..."

Gopnik says that "Tolkien would never have written about 'types of magical traps'."  Well, he did.  The Ring is a magical trap.  Old Man Willow is a magical trap, literally.  The barrow-wight is a magical trap ("They felt as if a trap was closing about them").  Frodo thinks Aragorn may be a trap.  For that matter, Aragorn thinks Frodo may be a trap ("The Enemy has set traps for me before now").  That's just from Book One.  Need I go on?

15th-21st p.

This is the meat of Gopnik's argument, in which he makes the very C.S. Lewis-type argument that, however awfully written Paolini, or Stephenie Meyer for that matter, may be, they're certainly appealing to something in their readers, and it's worth exploring what that something might be.  As they don't appeal to me, I can't judge the quality of Gopnik's answers, but I can wistfully regret that the author of this section of the article didn't communicate his insights to the author of the Tolkien section of the article.  "You don't 'identify' with Sherlock Holmes," he says.  Nor with Aragorn either; that's not what he's there for.  And his admonition that "the spell such works [as the Elder Edda] cast on their audience wasn't diminished by what we find tedious" (emphasis added) is a complete rebuttal to the unsympathetic critic who wrote that the Silmarillion is "dull as dishwater."  Now who was it who said that, again?

Mythcon coming up

It's been announced elsewhere so I can say it here too: our Mythcon in Berkeley next year has a new Author Guest of Honor: Malinda Lo, author of Ash and Huntress. Our previously announced GoH, Grace Lin, told us last month that she had to withdraw because she's expecting a baby at a time that would make her attendance unworkable. We on the committee spent some time ruminating as to what to do next, and we're really happy with our choice's work and with her acceptance.

Now, to get the word out. The Mythopoeic Society website ought to be the first place to go for up-to-date information, but it hasn't been updated yet, sigh. For years, I've been telling every arts and cultural organization I have contact with that they have got to keep the internal factual information on their website urgently up to date, because that's the first place people look for information in our brave new world, but this advice is always met with something between incomprehension and hostility.

Eventually we'll get it right, though, and I hope you'll attend.

reading and eating

The annual festive meeting of our local Mythopoeic book group was this evening. For our potluck, I made my roasted broccoli, a favorite at home which I've only recently figured out how to make portable and which I took to family Thanksgiving as well. (Skimp on the olive oil, so it doesn't get soggy after cooking, and do the final mixing of ingredients on site just before serving. Then remember to take all that stuff home, the step I haven't perfected yet.)

Before the readings, we talked for a bit about current movies, but my reading was inspired by a recent movie that hadn't gotten mentioned, and for good reason: Eric Idle's fantasia on Shakespeare authorship mania. Then I tried reading an excerpt from a paper I'd recently been asked to review, but instead of sounding hilariously bad it just came off as boring and ridiculous, so I soon stopped.

For next year, I have a couple of good pieces about cats saved up.

end of a journey

Two and a half weeks ago, B's mother died.

Today, she was well and truly buried. Many family, some kind friends.

The priest, current incumbent at her old parish where she hasn't been for a while, said that today we lay to rest our sister and gave the name of one of her daughters instead. Ouch. Sense of vertigo among the mourners. Profuse apologies to B's sister later.

The Navy came to the gravesite three strong, saluted slowly, played Taps from a boombox, folded a flag, spoke briefly and formally in honor of "my shipmate" (nice phrase) and got the name right.

That's not the whole story by any means. B. has been spending much of the interval going through belongings at her apartment. So have her siblings. There's more. Tuesday is my turn: I'm going over there to facilitate having the piano moved to our house, and our existing piano swapped out somewhere else. We already have her microwave oven in substitution for our own old one. Etc. Photo albums too. B. prepared the photo collage for the memorial service. And so.

a trip by car

To get there, you turn off the highway at the colorful old mining town wedged in between the steep canyon slopes. You then drive up out of the canyon for about 15 miles through rugged countryside with only the occasional scattered house, on a series of continuously twisty roads, enough to make even me slightly queasy, each more precarious and doubtful than the last, starting with a narrow state highway and ending up, for the last half mile, on a dirt rut.

Later, of course, you have to return the same way.

It's a beautiful house, spacious and comfortable, with evergreen verdant slopes all around, and the inhabitants thereof seem happy, and they work at home. But every once in a while one needs to leave, if only to do the shopping, and it passeth my understanding ... how anyone can live in a place like that.