Another thing about the Laura Benanti concert: she commented that she'd turned 40 while playing Liza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, and seemed to feel as if she'd gotten in just under the wire, that 40 was considered the age limit for the part.
That's interesting, I thought, because Mrs Patrick Campbell (as she was billed), the actress for whom Shaw wrote the original role in Pygmalion, was 49 when she created it on stage. How long she kept on playing it I don't know, but I did find a reference to her still doing it six years later, so when she was 55.
As Benanti would say, there's a lot to unpack here.
Kalimac's corner: a journal by DB
Monday, November 16, 2020
Sunday, November 15, 2020
online concerts
An interim report, because I have one or two more coming up today.
Jupiter Quartet
This concert was from the performing arts series of Middlebury College, which is in Vermont, but the performers were located at the University of Illinois. We'll have to get used to this negation of geography. I'm not in communication with Middlebury College; I heard of this from a publicist, but I hastened to sign up, because this is such a fine group with a good program.
They played Mendelssohn's Op. 12, which is the less heard of his early quartets; George Walker's "Lyric," which is perhaps the standard chamber work by an African-American composer; and a new piece by Michi Wiancko, new to me, yet another new musical work addressing global climate change. Wiancko is a master of making clicks, taps, snaps, and wails sound musical, and her employment of these in a movement depicting the soil microbiome underneath Central Park was particularly outstanding.
There was a locally-produced opener, the first choral music I've heard in the pandemic. The Middlebury College choir stood, masked and spaced out at least ten feet part, in the pews of a church to sing Bantu hymns and one by William Billings. The stark wooden interior surely helped with the acoustics, but I was still startled that so few people, and with masks on, could make such a resonant sound.
Pacifica Quartet
A favorite group of mine from Menlo appearances, they've exchanged for two new members since I last heard them nearly four years ago, but they've only gotten better. Startlingly effective performances of two Beethoven quartets, finding an unexpected fierceness in Op. 18 No. 1 (wow, does their new violist have bite, the way he digs into his instrument) and employing a supreme gentle tenderness in Op. 132. This quartet has some of the most curvaceous passages of beauty in all Beethoven, if they're played right, and these were played right. And in between came Voices by the ubiquitous Jennifer Higdon, a work that begins in chaos and moves slowly - very slowly, if you ask me - towards healing resolution.
This concert was sponsored by the Syracuse Friends of Chamber Music (and the performers were at home at Indiana University). I'd listened to a previous Syracuse concert (featuring the Jupiter Qt, connectedly enough) two months ago, and saw this one was upcoming, so I signed up and paid for a ticket. But it turned out to be difficult to hear, because there was some technical problem with the Vimeo feed, so all you got if you followed the link was a 30-second placeholder with a voice assuring you the concert was coming. And no matter what you did, you just got the same blurb all over again. Eventually the concert got up, after an apologetic e-mail, but in the meantime I'd actually phoned them in uncertainly over whether the problem was at their end or mine.
Laura Benanti
Part of a "Women of Broadway" series, co-sponsored by a host of non-profit US theaters, including the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which doesn't normally go in for this stuff, but from whom we heard about it. The series also features Patti LuPone and Vanessa Williams, but B. and I prefer Laura Benanti. I'd attended a performance of her Liza Doolittle in My Fair Lady at Lincoln Center last year, and she began this program with a run-through of abridged versions of all her songs from that show. Also featured songs from She Loves Me, Into the Woods, and various other sources. Accompanied by clearly her favorite pianist, plus a guitarist who managed to make his instrument sound like a synthesizer, I'm not sure why. Very nice performances regardless. Unlike the quartets (the Jupiters took a bow after each piece to deep silence), this concert had a gratifying smattering of applause, from the crew members filming it.
Between-songs patter included an account of her small daughter who doesn't like to hear Mommy sing, which must feel dampening. But while Benanti nattered too much, I was impressed with her answer to one audience question (they were on cards), "Do you think entertainers should use their platform to push political views?" Well, no, Benanti replied, but "there's a lot to unpack here." She altered the question to "Do you think humans should use their platform to express their beliefs?" Yes, she said. "I think the word 'push' implies that there's no consent involved ... but I live in the world we all live in," and while normally she keeps her counsel, there are things she feels, as a human, she should speak out about, and specified two she objects to: family separation policies and the threat to equal marriage. Good going.
Jupiter Quartet
This concert was from the performing arts series of Middlebury College, which is in Vermont, but the performers were located at the University of Illinois. We'll have to get used to this negation of geography. I'm not in communication with Middlebury College; I heard of this from a publicist, but I hastened to sign up, because this is such a fine group with a good program.
They played Mendelssohn's Op. 12, which is the less heard of his early quartets; George Walker's "Lyric," which is perhaps the standard chamber work by an African-American composer; and a new piece by Michi Wiancko, new to me, yet another new musical work addressing global climate change. Wiancko is a master of making clicks, taps, snaps, and wails sound musical, and her employment of these in a movement depicting the soil microbiome underneath Central Park was particularly outstanding.
There was a locally-produced opener, the first choral music I've heard in the pandemic. The Middlebury College choir stood, masked and spaced out at least ten feet part, in the pews of a church to sing Bantu hymns and one by William Billings. The stark wooden interior surely helped with the acoustics, but I was still startled that so few people, and with masks on, could make such a resonant sound.
Pacifica Quartet
A favorite group of mine from Menlo appearances, they've exchanged for two new members since I last heard them nearly four years ago, but they've only gotten better. Startlingly effective performances of two Beethoven quartets, finding an unexpected fierceness in Op. 18 No. 1 (wow, does their new violist have bite, the way he digs into his instrument) and employing a supreme gentle tenderness in Op. 132. This quartet has some of the most curvaceous passages of beauty in all Beethoven, if they're played right, and these were played right. And in between came Voices by the ubiquitous Jennifer Higdon, a work that begins in chaos and moves slowly - very slowly, if you ask me - towards healing resolution.
This concert was sponsored by the Syracuse Friends of Chamber Music (and the performers were at home at Indiana University). I'd listened to a previous Syracuse concert (featuring the Jupiter Qt, connectedly enough) two months ago, and saw this one was upcoming, so I signed up and paid for a ticket. But it turned out to be difficult to hear, because there was some technical problem with the Vimeo feed, so all you got if you followed the link was a 30-second placeholder with a voice assuring you the concert was coming. And no matter what you did, you just got the same blurb all over again. Eventually the concert got up, after an apologetic e-mail, but in the meantime I'd actually phoned them in uncertainly over whether the problem was at their end or mine.
Laura Benanti
Part of a "Women of Broadway" series, co-sponsored by a host of non-profit US theaters, including the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which doesn't normally go in for this stuff, but from whom we heard about it. The series also features Patti LuPone and Vanessa Williams, but B. and I prefer Laura Benanti. I'd attended a performance of her Liza Doolittle in My Fair Lady at Lincoln Center last year, and she began this program with a run-through of abridged versions of all her songs from that show. Also featured songs from She Loves Me, Into the Woods, and various other sources. Accompanied by clearly her favorite pianist, plus a guitarist who managed to make his instrument sound like a synthesizer, I'm not sure why. Very nice performances regardless. Unlike the quartets (the Jupiters took a bow after each piece to deep silence), this concert had a gratifying smattering of applause, from the crew members filming it.
Between-songs patter included an account of her small daughter who doesn't like to hear Mommy sing, which must feel dampening. But while Benanti nattered too much, I was impressed with her answer to one audience question (they were on cards), "Do you think entertainers should use their platform to push political views?" Well, no, Benanti replied, but "there's a lot to unpack here." She altered the question to "Do you think humans should use their platform to express their beliefs?" Yes, she said. "I think the word 'push' implies that there's no consent involved ... but I live in the world we all live in," and while normally she keeps her counsel, there are things she feels, as a human, she should speak out about, and specified two she objects to: family separation policies and the threat to equal marriage. Good going.
Friday, November 13, 2020
the last dangerous visions?
When Harlan Ellison died two years ago, my first question was, "So now what happens to The Last Dangerous Visions?" And when his wife and executor Susan Ellison died three months ago, I asked the same question.
The Last Dangerous Visions, for anybody who doesn't know, was the cutting-edge state-of-the-art anthology of original science-fiction stories that Harlan Ellison originally promised to publish in 1973. But never did. Over the next decade or so, he would regularly announce that a new publisher was about to issue the book and it really truly was going to come out this time. But it never did. Eventually this subsided and Ellison got reluctant to talk about it.
Meanwhile, several dozen stories by the brightest, mostly then young, names in the field sat in Ellison's basement, unseen by anybody. Over the years, several authors got sufficiently fed up to withdraw their stories, to Ellison's fury, and publish them elsewhere. One of these authors, Christopher Priest, wrote a short treatise, The Book on the Edge of Forever, pointing out that the sheer size of the volume was rendering it effectively unpublishable.
Now the Ellison estate's executor is J. Michael Straczynski, best known as the creator of the SF tv series Babylon 5. And today he has announced that LDV will be completed and "ready to submit to publishers" next April.
Well. If that's true, that's a remarkable thing. But reading over the details of JMS's announcement, my heart slowly began to sink. Because he's bitten off a huge mouthful and he's only cramming more in. His announcement with all the bells and whistles attached to it reminds me too much of the impending-publication announcements that Harlan used to make. And they sounded awfully credible, on the surface more than this one does, because they usually actually did have publishers, major trade publishers who'd guaranteed to undertake the book. Even today, reading these things, you feel sure it was about to appear. But it didn't.
The only difference is, now it isn't Harlan making the announcement. It's JMS. JMS has done a lot of productive work over the years, I guess. But so did Harlan. Harlan did have a lifelong habit of announcing all sorts of projects as finished when they sometimes hadn't even been begun. JMS, perhaps not so much, though I note that there's a whole section of his Wikipedia bio labeled "Unrealized projects." And this is a big one.
Here's some of what concerns me:
1. How many stories will it have?
JMS says "over a hundred stories" were commissioned for LDV. This is true. A list published in 1979 had 113 stories. That didn't include an additional 8 which had already been withdrawn or otherwise disappeared from earlier lists by that point. JMS says he won't include anything that's been withdrawn. (How generous of him. He doesn't have the rights.) According to LDV's Wikipedia page, that's 32 of the 121 listed stories, leaving 89. (Others add 5, leaving 84. Whatever.) Then there are "some" or a "few" - he doesn't say how many - that are now obsolete and whose rusted carcasses will be returned to the authors. Or their estates.
But that still leaves, what, 80? 70? 60? stories. That's a huge anthology. And then to that, he's going to update it. He's going to add stories by "today's heavy hitters" and "new voices" into the mix, "interweaving" them all "into a narrative flow." Even more stuff, none of it having anything to do with the book Harlan was editing.
And if JMS is going to get this done by April, even if he started as soon as Susan died - unlikely since as executor he'd have had a ton of other work to do - that's only ten months to commission these stories, wait for the authors to write them, edit them, and then figure out how to interweave them. That's a big job. The more so if the result is going to be "organized by topic," which I guess means all the near-future disaster stories in a row, all the alternate-history stories in a row, etc. I can't wait.
Then there's some mysterious project by Harlan, so big that JMS claims it's largely responsible for keeping Harlan from finishing up LDV, that's also going to be in the book. Yikes.
2. What about the introductions?
What I always thought prevented Harlan from finishing up LDV was the story introductions. When Harlan would announce the imminent publication of the book, he'd usually say something like, "Now I just have to go home and finish off the introductions ..." but Christopher Priest points out that, if they were to be anything like the introductions in his previous anthologies, with the number of stories in LDV the introductions would be the size of a monumental volume by themselves.
Did he ever get them done? What kind of shape are they in? Will they have to be updated? Will JMS write intros on that scale for the ones Harlan didn't do, and for the new additions?
3. How will it get published, and in what form?
At least Harlan always had a publisher lined up. JMS is waiting to do that until he's finished, but "several major publishers have already expressed significant interest in picking up the book upon completion." He's a veteran of Hollywood; he knows how much that kind of statement is worth. Even if they do, it could take another year or more for the book to appear.
And ... book? More likely several volumes, considering its size. Or we have other options these days: online? a download?
And who will have both the time and energy to read it all? Even the previous DV anthologies had less of an impact than they could have because they were so big, they were hard to absorb. And LDV, especially with the new additions, will be much, much bigger. And that which isn't new will be half a century old. The field has changed a lot since then. Even a story that's not obsolete will have a big hurdle to overcome with today's readers. If publication happens - and I still call that a big if - it's as if a huge boulder is hurtling through the air at a lake. It will make a huge splash ... and then it will sink to the bottom of the pond and never be thought of again. That I fear is what will happen.
If it appears at all, that is. I'm definitely curious, but I'm not joining the Patreon. We've been burned too often, even if not by JMS. He sounds too much like Harlan in his announcement. LDV was already a joke when I entered the field 45 years ago, and if it's actually going to appear I can wait a little longer. I'll believe it when I see it, and I always have.
The Last Dangerous Visions, for anybody who doesn't know, was the cutting-edge state-of-the-art anthology of original science-fiction stories that Harlan Ellison originally promised to publish in 1973. But never did. Over the next decade or so, he would regularly announce that a new publisher was about to issue the book and it really truly was going to come out this time. But it never did. Eventually this subsided and Ellison got reluctant to talk about it.
Meanwhile, several dozen stories by the brightest, mostly then young, names in the field sat in Ellison's basement, unseen by anybody. Over the years, several authors got sufficiently fed up to withdraw their stories, to Ellison's fury, and publish them elsewhere. One of these authors, Christopher Priest, wrote a short treatise, The Book on the Edge of Forever, pointing out that the sheer size of the volume was rendering it effectively unpublishable.
Now the Ellison estate's executor is J. Michael Straczynski, best known as the creator of the SF tv series Babylon 5. And today he has announced that LDV will be completed and "ready to submit to publishers" next April.
Well. If that's true, that's a remarkable thing. But reading over the details of JMS's announcement, my heart slowly began to sink. Because he's bitten off a huge mouthful and he's only cramming more in. His announcement with all the bells and whistles attached to it reminds me too much of the impending-publication announcements that Harlan used to make. And they sounded awfully credible, on the surface more than this one does, because they usually actually did have publishers, major trade publishers who'd guaranteed to undertake the book. Even today, reading these things, you feel sure it was about to appear. But it didn't.
The only difference is, now it isn't Harlan making the announcement. It's JMS. JMS has done a lot of productive work over the years, I guess. But so did Harlan. Harlan did have a lifelong habit of announcing all sorts of projects as finished when they sometimes hadn't even been begun. JMS, perhaps not so much, though I note that there's a whole section of his Wikipedia bio labeled "Unrealized projects." And this is a big one.
Here's some of what concerns me:
1. How many stories will it have?
JMS says "over a hundred stories" were commissioned for LDV. This is true. A list published in 1979 had 113 stories. That didn't include an additional 8 which had already been withdrawn or otherwise disappeared from earlier lists by that point. JMS says he won't include anything that's been withdrawn. (How generous of him. He doesn't have the rights.) According to LDV's Wikipedia page, that's 32 of the 121 listed stories, leaving 89. (Others add 5, leaving 84. Whatever.) Then there are "some" or a "few" - he doesn't say how many - that are now obsolete and whose rusted carcasses will be returned to the authors. Or their estates.
But that still leaves, what, 80? 70? 60? stories. That's a huge anthology. And then to that, he's going to update it. He's going to add stories by "today's heavy hitters" and "new voices" into the mix, "interweaving" them all "into a narrative flow." Even more stuff, none of it having anything to do with the book Harlan was editing.
And if JMS is going to get this done by April, even if he started as soon as Susan died - unlikely since as executor he'd have had a ton of other work to do - that's only ten months to commission these stories, wait for the authors to write them, edit them, and then figure out how to interweave them. That's a big job. The more so if the result is going to be "organized by topic," which I guess means all the near-future disaster stories in a row, all the alternate-history stories in a row, etc. I can't wait.
Then there's some mysterious project by Harlan, so big that JMS claims it's largely responsible for keeping Harlan from finishing up LDV, that's also going to be in the book. Yikes.
2. What about the introductions?
What I always thought prevented Harlan from finishing up LDV was the story introductions. When Harlan would announce the imminent publication of the book, he'd usually say something like, "Now I just have to go home and finish off the introductions ..." but Christopher Priest points out that, if they were to be anything like the introductions in his previous anthologies, with the number of stories in LDV the introductions would be the size of a monumental volume by themselves.
Did he ever get them done? What kind of shape are they in? Will they have to be updated? Will JMS write intros on that scale for the ones Harlan didn't do, and for the new additions?
3. How will it get published, and in what form?
At least Harlan always had a publisher lined up. JMS is waiting to do that until he's finished, but "several major publishers have already expressed significant interest in picking up the book upon completion." He's a veteran of Hollywood; he knows how much that kind of statement is worth. Even if they do, it could take another year or more for the book to appear.
And ... book? More likely several volumes, considering its size. Or we have other options these days: online? a download?
And who will have both the time and energy to read it all? Even the previous DV anthologies had less of an impact than they could have because they were so big, they were hard to absorb. And LDV, especially with the new additions, will be much, much bigger. And that which isn't new will be half a century old. The field has changed a lot since then. Even a story that's not obsolete will have a big hurdle to overcome with today's readers. If publication happens - and I still call that a big if - it's as if a huge boulder is hurtling through the air at a lake. It will make a huge splash ... and then it will sink to the bottom of the pond and never be thought of again. That I fear is what will happen.
If it appears at all, that is. I'm definitely curious, but I'm not joining the Patreon. We've been burned too often, even if not by JMS. He sounds too much like Harlan in his announcement. LDV was already a joke when I entered the field 45 years ago, and if it's actually going to appear I can wait a little longer. I'll believe it when I see it, and I always have.
pause for events
1. Virus cases keep going up, and have reached one million in this state. The highest per capita rates are in the outlying rural counties which long assumed they were immune. But it's serious everywhere. It only increases my determination not to go anywhere or see anybody. I did keep a dental appointment on Tuesday - when I said this was the most adventurous thing I'd done in weeks, the dentist chuckled and said many patients had told him the same thing, which I found an encouraging remark - and I'm picking up our weekly take-out grocery order later today (Friday), but, well-equipped with food, I haven't been out of the house between. I do have a lengthy auto trip planned, possibly as early as this next week, but it's purely expeditionary and I may not even have to get out of the car.
2. Cats are kind of frantic, though. Tybalt keeps coming into my office, climbing behind the venetian blinds into the window, and then coming back out again. This is not good for the blinds, which I have to keep closed to keep back-glare off the computer screen. (I may have to replace the blinds eventually; I was able to mail-order replacement slats for the heavy vertical blinds in the dining room window, a couple of which had lost their grip and crashed to the ground, no thanks to cats.) But it was Maia, the quiet, peaceful cat, who jumped up onto the kitchen counter and knocked the menorah to the floor with a mighty crash. Exit cat, top speed.
3. It's not the petulance of the giant baby hiding out in the White House that worries me, it's the people enabling it. Aren't there any adults in the room? Even the few daring to peep their heads out seem frightened.
4. Latest New Yorker, whose cover shows a line of people waiting to vote, one of whom is a woman holding a book - that would be B. - ironically includes a brief article on a book-summation service, currently wrestling with Ghislaine Maxwell's deposition in the Jeffrey Epstein case. "Context is so important," says the firm's "content producer" (no context is provided to explain what that title means). He adds, "I don't get cultural references sometimes. I'm from Sweden."
And I hear in my mind's ear the ghostly echo of an old Flying Karamazov Brothers line: "I am Norwegian: I do not understand."
2. Cats are kind of frantic, though. Tybalt keeps coming into my office, climbing behind the venetian blinds into the window, and then coming back out again. This is not good for the blinds, which I have to keep closed to keep back-glare off the computer screen. (I may have to replace the blinds eventually; I was able to mail-order replacement slats for the heavy vertical blinds in the dining room window, a couple of which had lost their grip and crashed to the ground, no thanks to cats.) But it was Maia, the quiet, peaceful cat, who jumped up onto the kitchen counter and knocked the menorah to the floor with a mighty crash. Exit cat, top speed.
3. It's not the petulance of the giant baby hiding out in the White House that worries me, it's the people enabling it. Aren't there any adults in the room? Even the few daring to peep their heads out seem frightened.
4. Latest New Yorker, whose cover shows a line of people waiting to vote, one of whom is a woman holding a book - that would be B. - ironically includes a brief article on a book-summation service, currently wrestling with Ghislaine Maxwell's deposition in the Jeffrey Epstein case. "Context is so important," says the firm's "content producer" (no context is provided to explain what that title means). He adds, "I don't get cultural references sometimes. I'm from Sweden."
And I hear in my mind's ear the ghostly echo of an old Flying Karamazov Brothers line: "I am Norwegian: I do not understand."
Thursday, November 12, 2020
a few events
1. A few more online concerts have come my way. Two more from the so-far splendid Baltimore Symphony chamber concert series: one for strings, featuring Nielsen's Little Suite and Vaughan Williams' Tallis Fantasia, the former of which doesn't get played much and the latter of which is always an enriching treat to hear; and one for brass and winds - yes, they claim they've found a safe way to gather groups of these air-spitting players, and they're the ones who have to live through it, not me - which included a piano-and-winds sextet by Louise Farrenc, the leading 19C female French composer, as well as Stravinsky and Beethoven.
It was interesting to see, elsewhere online, a video of BSO music director (albeit not identified as such) Marin Alsop critiquing movies and tv shows with conductors in them. She gave points mostly for enthusiasm, which she considers a vital element (thus ranking highly Jack Black in School of Rock - see, classical people are not snobs), but she did criticize conductors who wave both hands in unison. You don't do that if you're a professional conductor, she said. So that made it very interesting to see one of the assistant conductors in the BSO videos doing exactly that.
Also heard, because this was one of the items on the list of a publicist who likes to send me e-mails, was the Neave Piano Trio, which I think lives in NYC, but which was either broadcasting from or at least sponsored by the chamber music series at the University of Idaho, a place I haven't been since 1982. I signed up for this one because of the staggering array of composers: Clara Schumann, Amy Beach, Rebecca Clarke, and Jennifer Higdon. You don't get to hear a lineup like that - four very notable female composers spanning nearly two centuries - very often. True, I've never taken much to Beach, whose work seems to me to be comprised mostly of froth and treacle, and Clarke is rather modernistically astringent for my tastes. Both of these works met expectations, but it was good to hear all four together.
I have more online concerts - much more - scheduled for over the weekend. To hear music and then to write about it is my delight.
2. Another event that hit our calendars was the ordaining of a friend of ours as an Episcopal priest. The announcement she'd sent out a month ago didn't contain a link to the promised online event, but B. found it afterwards on M.'s FB page. We watched the better part of it. The ordaining bishop was also a woman, and it was a nice little ceremony, albeit much of it hidden behind various people's backs.
3. I've been reading a number of books on the moonshot program (the one that went to the Moon, silly, not something metaphorical), for reasons I'll explain later, not least because I have to call a halt to it soon for something more urgent. But that explains why, napping this afternoon, I was vaguely dreaming about training as an astronaut. For some reason this responsibility involved having my hair licked. I awoke to find that I was having my hair licked; thank you, Tybalt. Which I guess means that I am an astronaut, right?
It was interesting to see, elsewhere online, a video of BSO music director (albeit not identified as such) Marin Alsop critiquing movies and tv shows with conductors in them. She gave points mostly for enthusiasm, which she considers a vital element (thus ranking highly Jack Black in School of Rock - see, classical people are not snobs), but she did criticize conductors who wave both hands in unison. You don't do that if you're a professional conductor, she said. So that made it very interesting to see one of the assistant conductors in the BSO videos doing exactly that.
Also heard, because this was one of the items on the list of a publicist who likes to send me e-mails, was the Neave Piano Trio, which I think lives in NYC, but which was either broadcasting from or at least sponsored by the chamber music series at the University of Idaho, a place I haven't been since 1982. I signed up for this one because of the staggering array of composers: Clara Schumann, Amy Beach, Rebecca Clarke, and Jennifer Higdon. You don't get to hear a lineup like that - four very notable female composers spanning nearly two centuries - very often. True, I've never taken much to Beach, whose work seems to me to be comprised mostly of froth and treacle, and Clarke is rather modernistically astringent for my tastes. Both of these works met expectations, but it was good to hear all four together.
I have more online concerts - much more - scheduled for over the weekend. To hear music and then to write about it is my delight.
2. Another event that hit our calendars was the ordaining of a friend of ours as an Episcopal priest. The announcement she'd sent out a month ago didn't contain a link to the promised online event, but B. found it afterwards on M.'s FB page. We watched the better part of it. The ordaining bishop was also a woman, and it was a nice little ceremony, albeit much of it hidden behind various people's backs.
3. I've been reading a number of books on the moonshot program (the one that went to the Moon, silly, not something metaphorical), for reasons I'll explain later, not least because I have to call a halt to it soon for something more urgent. But that explains why, napping this afternoon, I was vaguely dreaming about training as an astronaut. For some reason this responsibility involved having my hair licked. I awoke to find that I was having my hair licked; thank you, Tybalt. Which I guess means that I am an astronaut, right?
Wednesday, November 11, 2020
feel like practicing your Spanish?
Mark Evanier found an absolutely splendid Panamanian production of Fiddler on the Roof.
Monday, November 9, 2020
in memo Alex Trebek
the long-suffering (it seemed to me, from the shenanigans the contestants and the category listings put him through) host of Jeopardy!
Has anybody ever explained why they insist that answers be put in the form of questions? It's irritatingly artificial.
I am going to commit an open copyright violation here, because this is too good to leave out. The great Christine Lavin wrote words to the Jeopardy theme song:
Back in high school you were a square
Carried books and slide rules everywhere
You got straight A's year after year
They called you geek, they called you queer
For every one who laughed in your face
Now's your chance to put them in their place
Because you're on a TV show
Where your big brain
Earns
Big
Dough
Has anybody ever explained why they insist that answers be put in the form of questions? It's irritatingly artificial.
I am going to commit an open copyright violation here, because this is too good to leave out. The great Christine Lavin wrote words to the Jeopardy theme song:
Back in high school you were a square
Carried books and slide rules everywhere
You got straight A's year after year
They called you geek, they called you queer
For every one who laughed in your face
Now's your chance to put them in their place
Because you're on a TV show
Where your big brain
Earns
Big
Dough
Friday, November 6, 2020
invincible ignorance
Occasionally one comes across someone who is simply unable to grasp the concept that you're explaining to them. It isn't often that this is a trained computer repairperson.
The people fixing B's computer had said they would move her hard drive to a new box. But it turned out that they cloned the hard drive instead. A problem had turned up with the new drive, and I wondered whether this was also true of the old drive.
Another worker in the shop, overhearing this conversation, undertook to interject himself into the conversation. He explained at some length that if there's a problem with the old drive, it will automatically reproduce itself in the clone. If true, that raises the question of why bother to clone the thing at all, but I didn't raise that. I merely said that that was very interesting but it didn't address my question.
So what is your question, he said. I said, could there be a problem with the new drive that didn't come from the old drive.
He said that was merely the same question in different words. I said no, it's the inverse of the first question. I tried several ways to explain it, and finally he said I was just using circular logic.
That's when I lost my temper, and, having goaded me into this, he then shrugged and went back to work. It occurred to me to draw a Venn diagram of problems with the old drive, problems with the new drive, and problems with both, but when I showed it to him, he crumpled it up and threw it away without looking at it. Invincible in his ignorance.
It occurred to me later that there was a simpler way of explaining the difference. If problems with the old drive are A, and problems with the new drive are B, then he was telling me that
If A, Then B.
And I was asking if it was also true that
If B, Then A.
Those are fundamentally different statements, a basic concept in elementary logic, so it's really disturbing to find someone who thinks there's no difference between them, and accuses you of circular logic when you try to explain it. Invincible ignorance.
The people fixing B's computer had said they would move her hard drive to a new box. But it turned out that they cloned the hard drive instead. A problem had turned up with the new drive, and I wondered whether this was also true of the old drive.
Another worker in the shop, overhearing this conversation, undertook to interject himself into the conversation. He explained at some length that if there's a problem with the old drive, it will automatically reproduce itself in the clone. If true, that raises the question of why bother to clone the thing at all, but I didn't raise that. I merely said that that was very interesting but it didn't address my question.
So what is your question, he said. I said, could there be a problem with the new drive that didn't come from the old drive.
He said that was merely the same question in different words. I said no, it's the inverse of the first question. I tried several ways to explain it, and finally he said I was just using circular logic.
That's when I lost my temper, and, having goaded me into this, he then shrugged and went back to work. It occurred to me to draw a Venn diagram of problems with the old drive, problems with the new drive, and problems with both, but when I showed it to him, he crumpled it up and threw it away without looking at it. Invincible in his ignorance.
It occurred to me later that there was a simpler way of explaining the difference. If problems with the old drive are A, and problems with the new drive are B, then he was telling me that
If A, Then B.
And I was asking if it was also true that
If B, Then A.
Those are fundamentally different statements, a basic concept in elementary logic, so it's really disturbing to find someone who thinks there's no difference between them, and accuses you of circular logic when you try to explain it. Invincible ignorance.
Tuesday, November 3, 2020
social distancing
Today I stopped in at a shop I don't often visit, to pick up an item I'd ordered. (Reasons why it couldn't have been delivered.) Found the front foyer of the shop roped off, with posted instructions to wait for an employee to let you in.
In the foyer was waiting a man whom I took for some store greeter, from the official-looking way he pointed at the bottle of hand sanitizer on a small table and mimed pumping the bottle and washing one's hands. It later turned out he was a customer who resorted to mime because his English was poor. He kept miming pumping and washing with more and more vigor and enthusiasm as I waited for him to move aside and give me room to do it.
Eventually we solved that one, and later still a clerk came by, asked what I needed, and then opened the rope and invited me in, while failing to provide room for me to move there. I waited, he gestured, eventually we got past that one also.
I've been in other shops which are a little more conscientious here.
Meanwhile, B.'s computer has crashed, for the third time in two months. In the repair place again.
In the foyer was waiting a man whom I took for some store greeter, from the official-looking way he pointed at the bottle of hand sanitizer on a small table and mimed pumping the bottle and washing one's hands. It later turned out he was a customer who resorted to mime because his English was poor. He kept miming pumping and washing with more and more vigor and enthusiasm as I waited for him to move aside and give me room to do it.
Eventually we solved that one, and later still a clerk came by, asked what I needed, and then opened the rope and invited me in, while failing to provide room for me to move there. I waited, he gestured, eventually we got past that one also.
I've been in other shops which are a little more conscientious here.
Meanwhile, B.'s computer has crashed, for the third time in two months. In the repair place again.
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