return of the Dark Tower syndrome

It's happened again. Someone whom I know to be sharp and intelligent wrote a reply to a contentious post of mine (in a blog comment section, not here) that was so determinedly ignorant and stupidly argued, and which even went so far as to refuse to accept my own evaluation of what my own opinion was, that I realized there was no point in replying, even privately: the Dark Tower syndrome had struck again.

This I've named for the reactions I got in the 1980s from both sides of the argument over the authenticity of The Dark Tower. It's when someone is so wedded to the truth and justice of their position on an issue that any finding of problems with it, even suggestions as to how to phrase a defense that would be more useful to people who'd like their concerns addressed, is considered as merely proof that you're sworn allegiance to the other side. To get this from both sides, as I did with the Dark Tower, is a rare achievement.

There could be an overlap here with how one responds to trolling, the asking of supposedly innocent questions which are just gotchas to open eternal quibbles, but I don't think that's the case here. If you're attacked by a troll and don't fall for it, you call them a troll, you don't accuse them of being loyal to the other side. And trolling only reveals itself after multiple exchanges, though it can be suspected earlier (and is often suspected wrongly), whereas the characteristic of Dark Tower syndrome is not a suspicion that the other person is trolling you, but a kind of huffy mulish defensiveness that appears from the beginning. The refusal to accept my own view of my own opinion is the final proof, the cherry on top.

I've not completely given up on the people who Dark Towered me, and I'm not giving up on this person either, but I'll be wary.

Tybalt, you have been a naughty cat

Late last evening, while I was elsewhere, the sound of a loud crash emerged from my office, and then so did a cat. Investigation proved that the ten-pound cat had jumped from my desk on to the hanging bookshelves next to it, which he'd never done before because they're fully occupied.

Thus the weight, or more accurately the momentum, of said ten-pound cat caused the entire assembly to fall to the floor, not incidentally knocking out the power cords from their wall outlets, and all of that is now buried in a large pile of shelves, shelf supports, and all the books and papers on it.

That means not only is my computer unplugged and without power, so are the room lights, so I can't attempt to clean any of this up until the morning.

Right now I have a lot of computer work to do: a book I'm in the middle of indexing, another indexing job about to arrive, and the revised proofs of the Tolkien Studies special issue came the previous day, with only a week to get the whole thing reviewed and returned. That'll have to wait.

The only amusing part of this is imagining how startled the cat must have been when its perch disappeared out from under it.

Then, literally in the middle of the night at 3 am - while I'm up, as I often am at that time, working on a totally different long-standing project - B. reports that the tank lever on the toilet has broken.

So that's the first job in the morning, waiting for the hardware store to open - late, 'cause it's Sunday - to find a replacement part and then hoping I have the mechanical savvy to replace the broken one. Relievingly, I do.

Followed by long job of picking up enough books and papers and shelves and shelf supports to uncover the power cords and outlets. Putting the shelves back up will have to wait for later; everything's now piled on my work table. Despite entreaties, the cat is not permitted in the room.

Fortunately everything electronic still works, and I'm here to report on that and then get back to work.

concert review: San Francisco Symphony

There are hazards to holding outdoor concerts in high-tech amphitheaters like Stanford's Frost, where I was last evening. Guest conductor Erina Yashima was about to lower her baton on the big post-intermission work, Dvorak's Eighth Symphony, when the interval's loudspeaker program of recorded Berlioz suddenly re-started. She had to wait until someone turned it off again.

Then, a few bars into the work, the music was ripped to inaudible shreds by a helicopter flying low directly over the amphitheater. She had to stop and then start over again, waiting until the helicopter was well and truly gone, which took a bit. More helicopters appeared during the slow movement, but not so low and not directly overhead, so the music could continue.

And it was good music, with this almost terminally attractive symphony given weight and character by subtle fluctuations of tempo in the opening movement, broadening out in the slow section of the finale's coda to almost tragic dimensions.

It was preceded by soloist Johannes Moser being more dutiful than energetic in Lalo's Cello Concerto, and by a newish piece by Syrian-American composer Kareem Roustom. Titled Ramal after a classical Arabic poetic meter, it proved to be full of post-Stravinsky irregular rhythms punctuated by percussion, but with a smooth orchestral style separated by section. I rather liked it.

The amplification system, which proved its necessity by going out briefly during a tune-up, sounded to me more tinny than it had been the last time I was here, three years ago, but that may also be due to my sitting considerably further back this time, but still in the section with actual chairs in it instead of sitting on the grass, three cheers for chairs.

As I was invited to this for a press event, I cheerfully accept the responsibility of letting you know that this was the first of a series of four SF Symphony concerts at Frost, each Friday evening for the rest of the month. The upcoming concerts will include both Strausses, Richard and Johann; Rachmaninoff and Gershwin; Kevin Puts and Gabriella Smith; and Pink Martini. They're surrounded in the schedule by a whole carload of jazz and Latin music performers, and - on August 3-6 - the San Francisco Ballet. Schedule and ticket sales.

Due warning: There are some rather precise requirements for getting in: all bags must be clear plastic, water bottles must be factory-sealed, and if you print out your ticket on your home computer, make sure the QR code appears: inability to get that is what tripped me up. And parking for large events can require quite a long walk around here. But it's really relaxing to sit outside in the evening, when the temperature has dropped to comfortably warm, with no bugs or humidity, and hear some music.

it's ready

Amid all the disastrous succession of mostly public bad news (I don't consider Boris's resignation to be good news, but the cessation of bad news, not that it's likely to help the UK's sorry political situation much), I have one piece of personal good news.

I've finished writing my Mythcon Guest of Honor speech. I'll be delivering it three weeks from tomorrow.

This had been worrying me, because I get ideas for scholarly papers but have trouble bringing them to completion. I considered and discarded two ideas for this speech before settling on one that I thought would work. I'd dredged my way through about a third of the writing before I looked through the notes I'd made, oh, nine or ten years ago, for a previous conference presentation that was never finished or published, and which I wanted to draw on here, to discover that the notes were a lot more thorough and complete than I'd remembered. (I really could have finished it up then.)

All of a sudden my paper wasn't one-third finished, it was two-thirds finished, and that gave me the vim to finish the rest up in short order. My writing is a transcription of my talking, and I love writing when what I'd say if I were talking with passion and interest manages to come out through my fingers and down on the page or screen. For me that's natural. Authors whose writing doesn't resemble the way they talk startle me.

I read it out and it came to 58 minutes, so I cut about 5-8 minutes' worth, putting that in footnotes so I can restore it for the published version.

Since then I've been tinkering with it, correcting mostly unclear reference (pronouns where they shouldn't, jumps in thought where I left a stage implied, etc.) and a big flaw of my writing, compound sentences that could easily be separated. I write that way because I see everything I say as flowing together into a single entity. In school I had trouble understanding the concept of paragraphing. "Start a paragraph when you begin a new subject," the teacher said, and I replied, "But the whole paper is about one subject." Eventually I figured that one out, but I still write that way.

As a result of my style of writing, it's usually good for oral presentation, and I've always enjoyed giving papers at Mythcon. I'm looking forward to this one, and I hope my little coterie of fans (I know who you are) are looking forward to it also. I hope to spark some discussion with this one: I have a couple little surprises for you.

BoJo must go

The alacrity with which Boris was able to find a new Chancellor and new other ministers upon the abrupt resignations of the incumbents made me wonder if the persistent bobble-head-floating-doll tendency of the British government would keep him going. Remember that the resigned Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, had been appointed to replace his paired resigned minister, health secretary Sajid Javid, after the last time he resigned in total disgust at Boris's governing methods. Didn't prevent him from coming back.

However, it appears that the first thing new Chancellor Nadhim Zahawi did was tell Boris that he had to resign. Michael Gove, the only other minister with close to Boris's political weight, had gotten fired for saying the same thing, but I guess firing your new Chancellor the day after you appoint him would be a little too much. So with that and all the massive number of other resignations at cabinet and sub-cabinet level, now it looks like he's really going.

So what happens next?

The Conservative Party controls Parliament, so the next PM will be the new leader of the party. If the leadership is contested, which it probably will be, this could take up to a couple of months. But who knows: in 2016 the candidates kept dropping out, either through lack of support or because something unsuitable cropped up (either in their past or because they opened their mouths) and they wound up with Theresa May because she was the last one left standing.

So Boris could remain PM for a short but indefinite period.

If the revulsion is so great that he has to go now, there will have to be an interim PM until the new leader is chosen. That's happened a few times with the Labour Party leadership out of office, or with PMs in other countries, but never with a UK PM since this procedure was established.

The default candidate for interim would be justice secretary Dominic Raab, because he's deputy PM and that's what the deputy is for. But if he's a candidate for the permanent post, incumbency could be perceived as an unfair advantage and they might have to get somebody else, probably a senior semi-retired figure.

Whatever happens, it's liable to be very soon.

in memory, Richard Taruskin

A few days ago I pulled out some of my books by Richard Taruskin to browse through during casual reading time. I always enjoy these. Taruskin, whose professorship at the UC Berkeley music department began after my days as a student, created the most intelligent, broadly knowledgeable, and entertaining reading of any scholar of music, outranking even my own professor at Berkeley, the late Joseph Kerman. I once described him as "something of the Harlan Ellison of musicology, or at least the Harlan before Harlan started groping people: loud, opinionated, combative, insanely prolific, and often annoyingly right."

I didn't know then that Taruskin had died last Friday. Dash it: we'll miss his voice. I only ever saw him once: he was in the audience at the first Stanford "Reactions to the Record" symposium in 2007. I didn't attempt to speak to him, even though I was just off a Shostakovich centennial article that leaned strongly on his work: he was just too awesome, even terrifying a figure. He was scheduled to speak at two subsequent conferences in that series, but both times had to cancel for health reasons.

Taruskin's magnum opus is a 5-volume (6 with the index) Oxford History of Western Music. Replacing earlier, more conventionally-written histories, it's selective and idiosyncratic, full of Taruskin's own views, not his opinions of what's good and bad, but his views of what's important to the history of music. Though Taruskin prefers to omit things rather than stuff everything in, it's stunningly comprehensive, covering the entire span of history of written musical composition in our culture (its designated subject), although it heavily concentrates on the last century, which gets two of the five volumes.

One may wonder what's there to write about, and why should a non-specialist care? But Taruskin's topic is the social history of composition (he doesn't have as much to say about performance): what social influences cause composers to write the way they do, how they react to it, how society treats their music. At least the last volume is like that: I picked it up cheap and haven't read the others, though I have friends who've bought the whole set.

But I have made a point of looking for Taruskin's essay collections. I have five of these, three of which are on his specialty, Russian music (of all periods, naturally). Here's my six Taruskin books with some highlights of each.

Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical Essays (Princeton UP, 1997)
Something of a "fix-up" in that it's presented as a succession of 14 chapters, not - despite the subtitle - a collection of essays, but it is in fact based on essays and reviews dating 1983-1996. The theme is the definition of "Russianness" in music and how this has led to the perception of Russia as a second-class nation musically, reliant on folk tunes and not up to the sublimity of German classicism. Taruskin, of course, thinks Russian musical identity is more robust than that. Often rather more technical than his other books. Covers composers from Glinka through Stravinsky and Shostakovich. I found the last the most interesting part: his prinicipal argument is that what we as listeners make of Shostakovich's music (what Tolkien would have called "applicability") is more significant than whatever the composer may have secretly meant (what Tolkien would have called "allegory"), and accordingly he's much less incensed by Volkov's fictions than in his later, more contentious writings.

Music in the Late Twentieth Century (OUP, 2005)
This is the final volume in the Oxford History series. It begins with the birth of the modernist/serialist hegemony in Europe in the wake of WW2, explaining how it began as a reaction to the war's destruction; considers subsequent trends like Cagean indeterminacy and minimalism, discussing the impetus behind those as well, and discussing the effect on classical composition of the rock revolution of the 1960s, which had a cultural impact on the reception of music unlike any previous popular music. Taruskin also takes two chapters in the middle to explore in detail two representative but contrasting composers, the elite modernist Elliott Carter and the conservative populist Benjamin Britten. Obviously it leaves out more than it puts in, but this has the virtue of enabling Taruskin to concentrate on the big broad picture, which he does compellingly. For a closer view of what he leaves out, there are other books.

The Danger of Music and Other Anti-Utopian Essays (UC Press, 2009)
Collection of 42 essays and talks dating 1987-2007, mostly for a popular audience. They're short and they're usually contentious. Taruskin is a compelling writer and a brilliant mind who's usually right, but he's exhausting to read in other than short doses, and perusal of the book convinces me that he's also a troll. In the sense that we use the term here on the interwebs. Virtually every reprinted essay is followed by a postscript, gleefully recounting all the completely wrong objections made by readers on first publication and explaining how completely wrong they were. Sometimes this was as much as twenty years earlier, and here's Taruskin lurking all that time just waiting for an opportunity to show these people up. Nor are these transgressors ordinary blokes off the street, but noted writers on music, themselves extremely sharp, people whom Taruskin otherwise respects. Much of the time their flaw, to hear Taruskin tell it, is that they assumed incorrectly that he was saying something that he was coming close to but not actually saying. Topics include a defense of Vladimir Horowitz from those who'd deride him as low-brow, the pointlessness of orchestras announcing a "Beethoven season" because for most of them every season is a Beethoven season, a magnificent critique of a set of "with friends like these ..." books ineptly defending the worth of classical music, and his infamous essay suggesting a little "forbearance and discretion" before programming offensive pieces, e.g. a certain opera extolling terrorism in the immediate wake of 9/11. This was of course mistaken as a call for censorship, and the postscript is as long as the essay.

On Russian Music (UC Press, 2009)
Collection of 36 articles dating 1975-2006, largely for a popular audience (some are for concert programs or record liners). Arranged roughly in chronological order by subject. Despite the relatively limited topic area, these are often just as contentious as the ones in the previous book. This is where Taruskin criticizes performing groups for using up some of their limited concert time reviving groveling Odes to Stalin by Soviet lackeys on the (dubious, frankly: I've heard some of this stuff) grounds that the music is good. This is also where Taruskin re-opens the Shostakovich wars. Let us specify that in the factual matters at hand, Taruskin and his more mild-mannered ally Laurel Fay (who did the actual scholarly work here; Taruskin's role was that of "Darwin's bulldog") were completely correct and their antagonists completely wrong and more than a little trollish themselves. Nevertheless it is rather startling to read Taruskin explain that he can say that one of those antagonists "is the very model of a Stalinist critic" and that his "method is precisely what is known in the West as McCarthyism" but that is absolutely not the same thing as calling the man a Stalinist or McCarthyite, not at all! He's not criticizing the man, you see, but only what he did. But what is a Stalinist or a McCarthyite other than a person who does the things associated with those names? Whom does Taruskin think he's kidding here? However, my favorite piece in the book isn't contentious at all: it's a tribute to Nikolai Miaskovsky. A second-rank Russian composer of the 20C's first half, Miaskovsky is beloved by connoisseurs of obscure classics because he poured his compositional energies into no fewer than 27 symphonies. "That heap of symphonies was to us record geeks what grapes were to Tantalus," says Taruskin, and is he ever right about that.

Russian Music at Home and Abroad: New Essays (UC Press, 2016)
Collection of 20 speeches and articles dating 1998-2015, though most are 2008 or later. Taruskin says in his introduction that he's mellowed out and become less contentious than in his previous collections. Who is he fooling? He's just as contentious as ever, defending Rimsky-Korsakov from charges of being a hack, defending Mussorgsky from Rimsky-Korsakov, defending Tchaikovsky from claims that he committed suicide, defending Shostakovich from Volkov and his acolytes, defending musical groups' right to cancel performances of pro-Stalin or anti-Semitic music, and defending Stravinsky from just about anything. I agree with Taruskin a lot more than I disagree, but my, is he exhausting.

Cursed Questions: On Music and Its Social Practices (UC Press, 2020)
Collection of 13 pieces, mostly talks and addresses, dating 2004-2017, all with titles phrased as questions. This collection is more obviously in hte spirit of his Oxford History than the other collections, mostly because of its concentration on what he calls "social practices." The essays being longer than in other books, they explore in considerably esoteric, but - as always with late Taruskin - compulsively readable depth. Some of the essays are specifically about trying to write music history. Others branch off it, discussing the invention of tradition (an old Taruskin bugaboo, most fully explored I think in an early book I don't have), the attempts by the serialist hegemony to dictate what modern music is, the arbitrary and changing definitions of highbrow and lowbrow, the difference between western and Russian perception of the meaning of music (also brought up in the specifically Russian books), and of course the eternal topic of the difference between discretion and censorship.

addendum

I wrote yesterday that five people I knew had caught the covid recently but none of them had been hospitalized.

Make that six people, one of whom is hospitalized. Crap.

not a hot July the Fourth

The temperature is rather temperate this week, so that's a good thing, but otherwise I was having a hard time feeling like celebrating. We suffered an attempted political coup directed from the highest levels of government last year, and too many people seem not to care; decades' worth of our rights are being stripped away in one massive attack by a group of maniacs; and the pandemic is still going on, marked by my friends' July Fourth party being canceled for the third year in a row. In the past few weeks, at least five people I know have caught the covid, and while none of them died or was even hospitalized, that's way too close for comfort.

But then I saw in the newspaper this article on the meaning of the Declaration's phrase "all men are created equal," and that was worth consideration.

First I'm delighted that nobody in it made the common but tiresome mistake of thinking that "equal" means "the same" and mocking the phrase because people are obviously not identical in personal attributes like talents or skills, or in material comforts. That's not what it refers to.

The immediate referent of the phrase in the Declaration was faith in the principle that, if the British people had representative government, the British colonists deserved it too. Unfortunately it's clear that Jefferson didn't mean everybody should have those equal rights: women, obviously; children; the poor; and, of course, slaves. But the same thing applied to that British representative government. Parliamentary seats hadn't been reapportioned since the Middle Ages, and all kinds of unpopulated places had representation while the new industrial towns were devoid. This was held up as a virtue. It was argued that if the legally unrepresented masses could consider themselves covered by the legislature, then it could cover the unrepresented colonies also, even though, unlike the industrial towns, they were 3000 miles and an ocean away.

So it's a little hard to say to the man who says, yes, all are created equal but that doesn't mean gay people have the right to marry whom they want, that no, that's unJeffersonian. It's wrong, but it's not pure hypocrisy. On the other hand, the ones who say that if all are created equal then we don't have to address inequality have missed the point. Addressing inequality is why the Declaration was written.

A little food for thought on this holiday.

berryal

Can you classify people by the type of berries they like to eat? I eat blackberries, which I developed a taste for when I lived in Seattle where they grew wild in profusion. At the height of the season I'd accompany a friend to harvest some and then she'd bake blackberry and apple pie.

B. eats blueberries. She puts them in her oatmeal in the morning. I don't eat blueberries: I have trouble with the concept of blue food.

Consequently berries of both kinds are on our weekly shopping list. For a couple of weeks now we've had trouble getting blueberries. B. wondered if they'd been scarfed up by people wanting to have red white and blue meals for the Fourth. But that week was a little early to be saving berries up that long for.

Whatever the reason, I went back out to another store and found the last two small containers of blueberries (we usually buy a large container) in the organic foods section. But this week, nada. Our regular Safeway was out, the larger supplemental one I often try was out, the nearby Luckys, not noted for its produce at any time, was out. It even had a notice that they were applying their sale price to raspberries on account of the shortage in blueberries.

I decided not to try the produce markets: they're good for large fruit like apples and peaches, but I don't recall having seen a lot of berries there.

Instead, I invested the time and gas money to drive to Lunardi's out in the south suburbs. As a different chain they might have their own distributor. And sure enough, plenty of containers of blueberries, with a label saying they were from Petaluma, a good farming town not far away.

So I came home with the blueberries, and also with a dinner's worth of the high-quality fresh crab cakes they do so well.

that's three more boxes gone

I sold four boxes of old books and magazines at the used bookstore last week, and this week got rid of three more boxes from the garage almost as expeditiously.

I'd found two boxes of material of my grandfather's that I'd taken after my mother and I cleared out his belongings after his death, and which I'd evidently never looked at, because I was surprised at how useless it all was for any purpose other than stoking his own memories. Bound volumes of the daily newsletters from cruises he'd taken in the 1950s. A scrapbook full of newspaper clippings from the year he chaired the local Community Chest. This was a campaign to raise money, but what it was to raise money for, the articles never did say. (It was for charities. This is what subsequently changed its name to the United Way.) The local paper was apparently so desperate for news items from the town's machers that they even printed a birth announcement for his first grandchild - that would be me - although my parents were living nowhere near the area at the time.

I knew from previous conversations that my brother would be interested in looking at this stuff before we discarded it. Instead, he just sealed it all back up again and took it away when he finally came over this week. He thinks his son, now only 7, will be interested some day.

Anyway, it's out of here. I'm old enough now that keeping stuff that I never use packed up because I might want to look at it someday is no longer really viable. That someday has arrived.

Also found and also out is a whole boxful of duplicate books about Tolkien and the Inklings, some of them rare pamphlet publications, that I gathered up to sell, or donate to the Mythcon auction, or something, years ago. I contacted a friend, or more accurately a friend-like acquaintance, who's in the Tolkien collector biz. He said he's retired from it, but when on request I sent him the contents list, he couldn't resist. He's no longer quite local, but he was in town this week so we met up in the parking garage of where he was doing his personal business, and he took it for a lot more money than I'd have gotten from the exceedingly de minimis bookstore.