Labor Day weekend

Once on a time, Labor Day weekend meant Worldcon, whether I was attending it or not. But a number of reasons, including the gradual departure of Worldcon from that once-sacred date, have eroded that connection. For many people, it's a last opportunity to have a summer grilling party, as suggested by the dearth of raw meat in the market when I went there early this morning to fill the holes from yesterday's weekly grocery order.

But I don't go to those, so for me it's just another weekend with no opportunity to look forward to a postal delivery on Monday.

Except that this weekend we have scheduled another heat attack. At least it won't be as lengthy as the previous one, so it may feel less enervating. But I am considering going out in my air-conditioned car to a naturally air-conditioned spot. Today's weather forecast suggests that part, though not all, of the coastal regions will be foggy and thus cool. So if the same holds for tomorrow, I may go out then. The only catch for a car trip of any length is the difficulty in pandemic times of finding a usable restroom.

Meantime, we hope that B's computer has been fixed, again. A few days ago her programs began slowing down and freezing. Took it into the repair store (the same one where we'd bought this computer a couple years ago, not that that makes any difference). An expensive day later, it came back, only to prove susceptible to sudden OS collapses and a subsequent error message declaring a refusal to boot. Took it in again. Apparently all the settings were wrong, but who set them that way? Anyway, it seems to be working now.

inside the quartet

So this week is the virtual and online Banff Centre International String Quartet Festival, which is what they hold on years in between their celebrated triennial competition, which I've attended twice.

But however good the performances are, what's most intriguing me are some pre-recorded interviews with quartet members from the 2013 competition, which say things that I haven't heard before about the musical relationship among members of a quartet.

Back when we first started the quartet, Joel and Bryan used to switch first and second violin. And Bryan made the decision that he wanted to play second violin. For multiple reasons. One reason was he thought Joel just wasn't a good second violinist. Which is a funny thing, but they're completely different roles, they're completely different strengths that you need to do each role. And Joel, on the other hand, loved when Bryan was second violin, because Bryan has that solidity, that groundedness; he knows when to project when he needs to. So, in the end, it was Bryan's decision, but that's how we ended up with the formation that we've now used for years. - Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt, viola, Dover Quartet

A lot of audience members often ask, is it the first violinist that leads the quartet, is it the first violinist that sort of cues everything. But really, at least in our quartet it's sort of the opposite. I think that in many ways I just kind of float on top of the rest of the players and I sort of let them lead me and show me how to play and what to play. - Sarah McElravy, first violin, Linden Quartet

Well, I think a violist should really love, support the others from inside. The role of the violist is usually not in the facade. You don't really see, you often don't hear exactly what he's doing inside the quartet. But yeah, it's supporting the others from inside. It's an internal part. - Avishai Chameides, viola, Noga Quartet

But this all makes sense to me. Because when I hear a really good quartet playing (the Dover, which I've reviewed twice, certainly qualifies, and the others were also competitors in this top competition), the musicians are audibly responding to the nuances in each other's playing, letting those features lead their own performance, building a structure out of their interactions. They really are supporting each other, as the Noga violist feels his job is, as the Linden first violinist expects from her colleagues, as the second violinist of the Dover provides to the first.

exercise vehicle

Probably the biggest impact of the pandemic on us personally has been the closing of the local gym, a 24-Hour Fitness outlet, where we had memberships. Even with spacing and the cleaning down of machines between users, it's still full of sweat and heavy breathing, so not a good place to go in the circumstances.

The problem is that that pretty much put paid to my exercise program for about six months. I'd been relying mostly on the gym's reclining stationary bicycle, which is far superior to the upright kind on the tuchis. I'm no longer steady enough to ride a real bike, and I can't walk fast enough to build up any cardio benefit.

Eventually B. bought online a portable pedaling device. It's not all that portable, and it's not all that steady and smooth, but it works if you're seated in the upright chair in front of the tv without causing discomfort, and I can watch old episodes of something or other while exercising. Time to go down soon and do that. I'm trying setting my exercise sessions mid-evening; let's see how that affects my sleep.

Meanwhile, today's mail brings official notification that 24-Hour Fitness has declared bankruptcy, with instructions for potential creditors. We're not that, as they suspended monthly membership fees when the gyms closed, which was civil of them but doubtless contributed to the current crisis. Bankruptcy is more often to restructure debt than to terminate the company, so here's hoping they're still in business whenever it's safe to go there again.

alternative universe VII

The alternative universe is beginning to diverge enough from the bleak one we're living in that it's starting to get harder to say what I'd be doing in it. The fall concert season would be gearing up, and I'm sure I'd have assignments to review concerts, but I'm not going to go hunting down now-abandoned concert schedules to try and guess what these might have been. The one thing I can say for sure is that neither of the fall series I'd bought tickets for included anything from before October.

So the one place I'm sure I'd have been during the alternative September was in Ashland for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which we'd be arriving for on the 28th and leaving on October 2nd. Three of the plays we might have been seeing had actually made it to the stage at the start of the run in February, and OSF released reference videos of these to their members later on. The one Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream, I found enjoyable, though not a patch on the brilliance of the National Theatre version which I've also seen online. The two other plays, The Copper Children and Peter and the Starcatcher, however, were quite tedious, and I'd have been squirming in my seat through them, something that's only rarely happened to me at Ashland before. Though at least the former was short, and I got through all of the video, while for the latter I bailed out early on. The problem wasn't the acting or the production, but the scripts: the plots were meandering and failed to make meaningful points, and the texts were loaded with exposition which becomes deadly on stage. I was more looking forward to the Henry VI set boiled down into two plays, a process I've seen before and which made dynamite. But this year's version of that one never made it to stage, so no video. I hope OSF does better next year.

Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival

So word had been forwarded to me that the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival, which is based I think in Detroit, was going to be online and free. So I decided to sign up for this, and for their eight online events over five days they kindly sent me one e-mail a day with links to the YouTube videos. The evening concerts, though only an hour long each, were imaginatively programmed and featured some performers I knew from Menlo. Obviously I couldn't attend the one live event, which featured a work by John Luther Adams performed by musicians spread out over three acres of the Cranbrook School grounds. I've been to one spread-out spatial outdoor concert like this, and didn't find anybody I wasn't standing near to be at all audible, so I doubt this worked very well.

More interesting to me were the morning string quartet interviews, especially because three of the four quartets I knew from Banff (or rather two-and-a-half, since only two of the Rolston's members are still the ones they had when they won top prize at Banff four years ago). The interviews, which were over typically stuttering teleconference software, were all conducted by Philip Setzer, who may be a great chamber music violinist, but he should retire from interviewing. His response to anything the interviewees said by telling some hoary and usually limp anecdote from his own long experience, and the demeaning joshing remarks he'd make to the performers, were fairly painful, and you could see them gritting their teeth to get through it, because they didn't want to be rude to the old guy who could still influence their careers.

But the pre-recorded performances they offered were good, and the best was the Viano Quartet in Mendelssohn's Op. 80. Despite the disconcerting effect of their masks making them look like pirates, they turned in a tight and sizzling performance that shows why they were a Banff competition winner last year. It's still online for a little while: here, have a listen.

Then afterwards the festival sent me one of those useless little surveys, with a subject line on the e-mail reading, "Let us know you're experience with the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival." Oh, Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival, shame on you.

some books read

The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir by John Bolton (Simon & Schuster). One book I would only get from the library; I wouldn't give Bolton any money. Painstakingly detailed account of the author's time as National Security Advisor, that feels like it's taking you through the story at the same pace that he lived it. This does have the advantage of giving a concrete feeling of what it was like to exist inside the Trump administration, but after a while the eyes water, interest in the details of negotiations with Russia, North Korea, and Venezuela (which gets an unexpectly large amount of space here) falters, and you begin skimming through looking for the juicy bits which were already mined by journalists anyway. For a truly disconcerting and vertiginous experience, read this book in between watching old episodes of The West Wing.

Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956 by Anne Applebaum (Doubleday). Sweeping account, focused on Poland, East Germany, and Hungary, of how the Russians came in and rogered these countries. Large-scale chapters on various topics explore how the invaders and their patsies were slowly able to put the weight on and force acquiescence from the citizenry. Of course the fundamental reason, the fist inside the glove, that the Communists could do this was the threat of the Red Army. The book makes compelling reading, despite the dryness of the presentation, because of the clarity and meaningfulness of the facts. A few places give a hint of some limitations in the source material: Applebaum has clearly read the memoirs of Andrzej Panufnik, but the absence of virtually any other references to classical music, in a book with a heavy emphasis on cultural themes, is noticeable.

The Bible Doesn't Say That by Dr. Joel M. Hoffman (St Martin's). The title suggests a journalistic debunking, but it's nothing of the sort, and specifically in no way an attack on the Bible, but an attempt to cleanse it of misinterpretations. The author is a Biblical scholar and writes like one, straining towards a general-reader's approach as he fussily explains the difference in nuance or in rhetorical import between some Hebrew word and its usual English translation, littering the text with extraordinarily inept parallels. He disconcerts the reader by brushing aside various controversies, like the question of whether Isaiah says "a virgin" or a "young woman", as insignificant issues of fuzzy translation. Even when he ought to be tearing into red meat, as with "no, there's no such thing as the Rapture," he's fussy.

Lingo: Around Europe in Sixty Languages by Gaston Dorren (Atlantic Monthly). Brief but concrete essayettes on various aspects of language - internal things like vocabulary and, yes, grammar; external ones like place in national and ethnic culture - each illustrated by one or more European languages, which turn out to have distinct style markers even from their related neighbors. Much of what's in this book I already vaguely knew, but it's nice to have it confirmed (like the inter-intelligibility of the Scandinavian languages, or the story of the resurrection of Celtic ones), and yes, what it always seems like is true: Spanish really is spoken faster than other languages.

At Home: A Short History of Private Life by Bill Bryson (Doubleday). Another one of Bryson's bursting-with-facts entertaining reads, like A Short History of Nearly Everything (so long as "everything" is defined as "earth sciences and biology"), One Summer (the event-filled American year of 1927), and Made in America (its language), like them it is packed with varyingly-relevant digressions. Organized by the rooms of a 19C English house, it discusses its design, construction, and what went on there, from treatment of servants to disease to forestry (houses need to be built, after all) to nutrition to the acquisition and use of whale oil to the advent of the telephone, going as far afield as to explain how (and why) the Eiffel Tower, no house and not English, was built. An irrelevant footnote regarding Parliamentary elections on p. 24 completely confuses pocket boroughs and rotten boroughs, leading me to wonder what else Bryson gets wrong with utter confidence in what he's saying.

... I wasn't one

So Annette Bening and Bill Nighy are starring in a new movie about a long-married couple who break up. And although they didn't write the script, they have a lot to say about women, men, and relationships.

But of all they say, the part that most struck me was this:

“I don’t like the look of hardly any versions of being male, frankly,” says Nighy. “I never found those expressions of masculinity attractive. When I was younger I’d keep quiet in the company of men because I always felt that I wasn’t one.”

That I wasn't one. That really speaks to me: or did, when I too was younger. Teens, twenties. I didn't feel comfortable classing myself as a boy or man. That implied things I felt I was not. But I never thought I was a woman in the wrong body either. I didn't know what I was.

Eventually I grew comfortable with just being me, and knowing that other men felt the same. Perhaps Nighy did too; notice he speaks in the past tense. There is hope.

faint little object

Never mind why this came up, but I was wondering why it took over 60 years after the discovery of Pluto to find any of the other, now known to be numerous, trans-neptunian objects in our solar system. It wasn't because they weren't being looked for. Clyde Tombaugh found Pluto by chance, but it was in the course of a search for additional planets, which he kept up for another dozen years without finding anything else out in that zone. (Please note also that these things are damned hard to notice. Pluto was first photographed over 20 years before being discovered, but nobody noticed it wasn't just a faint star until Tombaugh used his blink comparator.)

The obvious answers are 1) because he was looking in the ecliptic, and Pluto has the least eccentric orbit of the bunch, or so I have read it does; and 2) though very faint, it's by far the brightest such object. But how much brighter is it? A search for a list of the apparent magnitudes of these objects didn't produce anything, though perhaps you can find one. What I did find was a list of the absolute magnitudes, which is not the same thing, and doesn't tell us how visible they are from Earth. I can get the apparent magnitude from Wikipedia articles for at least some of the objects (not all of them have Wikipedia pages), but I don't want to have to look them all up.

The two brightest in absolute terms are Pluto and Eris, which are both between -0.7 and -1.2, depending on which sources you consult. Pluto's apparent magnitude varies from 13.65 to 16.3, depending on where it is in relation to us. Eris has a much more eccentric orbit, but is mostly much further out, and its apparent magnitude is given as 18.7, though that's got to vary. At any rate it's certainly a lot harder to see, though I note it was first photographed fifty years before it was discovered. (The term for this is "precovery.")

(The best precovery story I've found is this: when Galileo was studying the moons of Jupiter, he noticed a star behind Jupiter which seemed to move, but he ignored it. It was Neptune. Which wouldn't be officially discovered for well over another 200 years.)

Anyway, I'm disinclined to look up a bunch more objects, but that's enough to give me a guess as to what I'd find.

sleep according to cat

Now that B. is retired, we want to sleep in, and that means without manic cats bouncing against the walls in our bedroom, hoping that we'll get up. Of course one of us will get up to feed them at 5 am (usually B, unless I'm still up from my frequent middle-of-the-night awake spells), but then we want to go back to sleep again.

Often times we toss the cats out of the bedroom and latch the door. Sometimes it doesn't stay latched. Even if it does ... this morning I was up, in my office, when the cats started prowling in around 4, hoping for food. I fed them at 5 and then went back to bed, latching the door on the cats. But that didn't satisfy Tybalt, who started pawing and scratching at the door.

So I got out of bed. I went to the door and knelt on the floor, so my face would be at cat-level. I cracked open the door, stuck my face in the crack, and hissed. This is by far the clearest way to express disapproval to a cat. Tybalt was so startled he leapt backwards. Then I shut the door again. Pawing and scratching did not resume. O blessed sleep.

trips in waiting

When I was working, often long hours with little vacation, I would muse on the things I'd like to do and trips I'd like to take if only I had the time to do them. But when I was between jobs and had the time, I'd forget what I'd been thinking of. Eventually I decided to keep a list and just consult that the next time I had the opportunity to travel. This worked splendidly.

So now I think I will start a list of the trips I want to take once the virus is no longer a danger. This doesn't include a pair of 2020 conferences I already signed up for which have hopefully (a word I'm using in the traditional sense) rescheduled themselves for 2021.

1 and top priority: to visit my brother in Pittsburgh. I haven't been there since before he moved house (though I've seen him when he came out here), for lack of an urgent reason to go. But he was recently ill for a while, and I couldn't go and help out (not least because Pennsylvania has quarantine). So as soon as I can go, I will.

2: to visit our nephew and his family, and some friends, in Seattle. This one is for B. and me together. We're going to drive up, which we never have done together further than Portland. But hey: she's retired, so we have the time. We were going to do that after going to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in October, but that's out, so it'll have to be next year.

3: Pinnacles National Park. Day trip, since it's only 80 miles from here. I've been to all the National Parks in California at one time or another, but I haven't been to Pinnacles since before it was a national park. I was thinking of going in February, when I still had an annual pass I got without asking when we went to Cabrillo NM in San Diego last summer, but I didn't get around to it, and after that it was too late.

4: The Mother Lode gold country in the California Sierras. This is a road trip I started working out last year. I've been here before, several times, but never comprehensively or in the amount of detail I'd like. As I worked it out, I could do this satisfactorily in three full days plus time to travel there and back. And it's smaller-scale than, for instance, my week in Montana a couple years back.