sweet dish served cold

I attended an online session in which half a dozen Tolkien scholars gave brief presentations discussing aspects of the second season of Rings of Power. I had figured - correctly, by the combination of the experience and the thrust of the talks - that this would be not only a quicker but a more entertaining way of finding out what happened in it than by actually watching the thing.

My heart was warmed by the sight of all this ragging on the show in the same way that I was ragging on Peter Jackson twenty-odd years ago. And I told them that.

concert review: Palo Alto Philharmonic

I've been to this local community orchestra before, and I might have gone to this concert anyway, but I had a special reason: our niece E. has joined it. She plays double bass. In fact all three of the double bass players in this orchestra are women, and if you're reminded of the Netflix documentary The Only Girl in the Orchestra about the first woman, a double bass player, to join the New York Philharmonic, so am I. (I also know someone who used to be a cellist in this orchestra, but he left some time ago.)

A few other family members, including our nephew L., E.'s husband, showed up to cheer along. B., however, had been at a music-making session earlier and had had enough for one day. L. was attempting to concoct a baseball joke about third bass, but I warned him it's been done.

The program featured a flute concerto by the Japanese composer Yuko Uebayashi, with Ráyo Furuta as soloist. I've heard Uebayashi's flute chamber music before, under Furata's curation, and I liked it a lot. I was not so excited by the concerto, which was more of the Debussyean impressionist part and less of the bouncy, exciting part. E. confessed that she wasn't always sure what key the music was in, which likely was a result of the Debussy influence; and listening to the orchestra, I'm not sure they always knew what key they were in either. Furuta, though, as usual was a dazzling soloist.

Followed by Beethoven's Fifth, a dramatic and urgent, and pretty well together, performance, nicely led by music director Lara Webber.

That was Saturday. On Friday, B. and I did go out together, for a concert by Brocelïande, our favorite Renaissance/folk band. Half of it was the Christmas seasonal music they do so well; the other half was their music for other seasons to honor the publication of their first songbook, which covers that part of their repertoire. They were a little tired and out of sorts this time, but it was enjoyable nonetheless.

quiz: why is the Pentagon in the shape of a pentagon?

1. Because it would be silly to call a building "The Pentagon" if it wasn't shaped like a pentagon.
2. To signify the five branches of the military: Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, Coast Guard.
3. To evoke the shape of 15th-century fortifications.
4. To confuse any potential assailants, like the ones on 9/11, as to which face of the building to attack.
5. To best fit in the space they decided to build it in.
6. To fit in the space they were originally going to build it in, but they moved the site and decided to leave it as a pentagon because it looked cool.

what we have come to

This review of the new War of the Rohirrim movie, which like other reviews I've seen describes as dull and forgettable this attempt to fill out Tolkien's brief backstory of Helm's Deep, gets one important thing critically right. The author writes, "Game of Thrones ... and others have assumed that fantasy will only appeal to modern audiences if it's people using violence to jockey for position. This is a far cry from The Lord of the Rings the world fell in love with, where power is a corruptive force and inflicting violence, while necessary in war, is not necessarily what makes a hero." (I've moved a comma to improve the grammatical sense.)

This is one of the strongest of the important points that distinguish Tolkien's work from the hack-and-slash fantasies so often incongruously associated with his. I once wrote, "Those mighty-thewed warriors would consider even Aragorn a rather sniveling fellow, and would not grasp the concept of the non-violent Frodo as a hero at all." So many people don't get this difference; this writer does; so far so good.

The problem is that context shows that what the writer means by "The Lord of the Rings the world fell in love with" is the Jackson movies. We have reached a state of degradation where Jackson's atrocious distortion of Tolkien's themes looks like a beacon of faithfulness to the original in comparison with the even worse atrocities - including Jackson's Hobbit - that have come since.

I survived only one episode of Rings of Power and found myself wondering why anyone who loves Tolkien's work would even want to watch this. The amoral whinging - so similar to the description of War of the Rohirrim in these reviews - is so totally unlike Tolkien as to leave nothing in common but a few of the character names. Surely that's not enough to account for its appeal. You might like this kind of hack fiction also, but only as an entirely separate thing: to affiliate it with Tolkien's suggests you weren't paying attention when you read the original.

Such a problem infects another review of War of the Rohirrim I've seen which takes a similar tack to the first one. This author claims that the sheer length of Jackson's movies is "part of why [they're] so beloved," explaining that "Jackson's films mimicked the feeling of reading Tolkien's novels, more focused on spinning a yarn than structuring a story for the necessary constraints of television."

Well, that Jackson didn't care about constraints for structuring his story is true. Jackson told the story the way he wanted to, ignoring the "rules" of moviemaking whenever he wanted to (which is why I refuse to accept the necessities of the rules of moviemaking as a defense for his atrocities on the source material). He didn't tell it the way that conventional moviemakers would have wanted, or the way that Tolkien would have wanted.

But if that's what makes his movies beloved, then his Hobbit - even longer (relatively) and less structured than his LR - should be even more beloved. But it isn't, so that's hogwash. And even more hogwashable is the claim that LR "mimicked the feeling of reading Tolkien's novels." My god, did you see the movies? Did you read the book? Despite the movies' length, the rush-rush-rush of the action, the pitching directly from one catastrophe into the next (not 100% accurate, but it feels that way next to the book), with pauses either entirely omitted (where's the days-long creeping through Moria, for instance? It could have been depicted in a brief shot of a few seconds without adding anything to the run time) or treated ineptly (Rivendell, beautiful but perfunctory and hamhanded, and Lorien, not even beautiful) is so far from mimicking the book as to be one of the atrocities.

I won't be watching War of the Rohirrim. I have no interest in a hack-and-slash adventure, even if it's supposedly set in Tolkien's world and has his invented names on some of the characters. And I don't get why other Tolkien fans would bother to watch it.

two little concerts

Sunday I went to a Harmonia California concert. As with the previous time, I was impressed with the strong and heavy sound of this tiny (17-person) string orchestra, perfect for Baroque-period works in the minor (a Handel concerto grosso and an oboe concerto variously attributed to one or the other of the Marcello brothers - soloist Laura Griffiths was skilled far beyond the community orchestra level) and Tchaikovsky's Serenade.
Also on the program, a new five-minute piece by the orchestra's manager, Alan Hebert, who's taken up composition in his retirement from his day job. It's inspired by his favorite composer, Gerald Finzi. Finzi? That's an unusual choice for ... it sounded at least as much like Delius to me.

Tuesday a student group at Stanford was playing two Brahms chamber works with piano: the Quintet Op. 34 and the Quartet Op. 25, both favorites of mine. As often, especially with Brahms, I wished my mother were alive to go with me. The result was rather tepid in the offering, but earnest enough and competently played. The students, a group of mostly juniors who've been playing together since they were frosh, include 3 computer science majors, one in biomedical computation, and one in symbolic systems, whatever that may be. As B. points out, you don't go to Stanford to major in music. You play it on the side, and that's what they do here.

Getting there was a little exciting. The vet had been running busy, and I didn't get the cats out until 6. From there it's 15 minutes home without the commuter traffic which was heavy; the Stanford concert was at 7:30 and it takes 20 minutes to get there. In between which I wanted to make and eat dinner (that's myself and B). So I pan-fried up the frozen quesadillas I'd bought at Lunardi's last week. Being frozen they actually took longer to cook than the ones I make myself, but at least I didn't have to assemble the ingredients. Result, mixed quality.

cats in bondage

Every time one of our cats wanted to snuggle in the last couple of weeks - and they've wanted a lot of it - I felt guilty, knowing that today we would betray their trust and take them to the vet. Maia did her damndest to avoid being locked up in the cat carrier, while Tybalt sort of gave up. He's a very bright and personable pussycat, and I think he's figured out from past experience that resistance is futile.

That didn't prevent him from yowling loudly from the carrier, at least whenever he could see that I was around. But unlike Maia, who darted for cover the instant we opened the carrier on returning home, Tybalt just sort of sauntered out and was soon looking for love and petting again. Maia reappeared as soon as there was Food.

Tybalt has a heart condition, and part of his vet appointment was an echocardiogram, which he hadn't had before. I was afraid that being forced to lie prone for ten minutes while the sensor rummaged around his chest might traumatize him, but he seems OK. The vet said the cats were well-behaved, which is not how they sounded as the stereo yowling accompanied me as I carried the two hi-fi speakers into the vet's office.

another online conference

This weekend's was co-sponsored by the Tolkien Society (UK-based, though very international) and the Tolkien Society of Serbia, and Saturday's papers were to be in Serbian. I was busy anyway, so I skipped that, and listened to as much as I could - not much, as it turned out - of Sunday's in English.

The best one I heard was a presentation by Erik Jampa Andersson on the historical framing of the legendarium. He talked lucidly and with command of the material about the purported fictional translations, and about the real-world historical setting, postulating that Tolkien pulled back from the initial idea of a mythological English origin story to something set further and further back in history,* to the point - Andersson said - that the legends could be depicted as the origins not just of English or even broadly European myths, but more generally - so as to authorize anybody to write Tolkien fanfic or create media adaptations? I wasn't quite clear what the argumentative point was here.

Andersson then segued into discussion of media adaptations in general, and here I lost more of his thread. Noting Tolkien's belief that drama was naturally hostile to fantasy, producing mechanical tricks which strain to generate secondary belief, Andersson simultaneously argued that viewers of fiction films can't be totally immersed into the experience because they can't forget that they're watching actors and not the 'real' people, but also that a movie, because it is visual and auditory, not just textual, 'cements' that version of the story in viewers' minds, making them think that's the 'correct' version.

This ties in with my argument about media colonization - that you can't just ignore an effective movie and take the book down from the shelf, because the movie will be in the head - but Andersson was more interested in contrasting this 'cementing' with Tolkien's preference for unreliable narration.

Here I thought he went a little far. It's true that Tolkien experimented with writing stories that were factually unreliable within the fictive universe, but I think you can tell which ones those are, and while there are small points in The Lord of the Rings which are unknown or unanswered, the oft-used trope of claiming Sauron as the hero and depicting the book as a giant libel on him does not, I think, fall into that category. I mean, you can write that, but don't claim Tolkien's imprimatur on it.

*Andersson said what I've also noted, which that it is often difficult to explain to people that Tolkien's legendarium is set - as Andersson very nicely put it - not in an imaginary place, but in a real place in an imaginary time.

reading and eating

Today was our book discussion group's annual 'reading and eating' meeting, where we gather for food and to read short selections of our choice aloud to each other. And it was our second year in the back room of an Irish pub. Seven people again, almost all the same folks as last year. And we had lunch, most taking food typical of an Irish or British pub, only I had a caesar salad, and then did our reading.

As B. and I came by car, it wasn't difficult for me to lug along all three newly-published volumes of Tolkien's Collected Poetry to show them off and to read from. My first selection I introduced by saying "You all know the song which ends 'That's what Bilbo Baggins hates! / So carefully! carefully with the plates!' But what did J.R.R. Tolkien hate? Motorcycles!" And I read the previously unpublished poem expostulating almost incoherently against motorcycles in alliterative verse.

Other readings included more Tolkien, William Morris, Charles Dickens, Connie Willis, The Bloggess, and Yangsze Choo if I've spelled that correctly.

On the drive up I had the radio on, and Saturday morning is the weekly opera broadcast, into which we were dumped in the middle. We tried to figure out whose music it was. The sung language was German, so that limited the possibilities. The orchestra was wildly emotive enough to be Wagner, but the tone colors didn't have a distinctively Wagnerian air. B. thought maybe Weber, who certainly could be weird enough, but I thought the harmonic language beyond him. Then came a passage to which my comment was, "Now it sounds like Richard Strauss." It was. The act ended just before we arrived. It was Die Frau ohne Schatten.

the text police

I realize there are far more important things going on in this article, but what caught my eye in this story of dating gone wrong was the description of this as suspicious in the man's behavior: "Over the four weeks that they chatted virtually, though, he was 'hot and cold'—sometimes going silent for eight hours."

Eight hours? That's how long an average human being goes silent every day because they're asleep. I've never been used to instantaneous back-and-forth message communication, not even on e-mail, and I certainly wouldn't tolerate it now. If anyone started sending me messages at a rate at which an eight-hour gap was considered 'going silent,' I'd have to ask them to stop. The idea of being tied down to my mobile phone like that is horrifying. (When would I have the time to charge it?)

All this was going on by text, of course, and the above even leaves aside the fact that I hate texting anyway. I'm a touch typist, and any form of typing which doesn't allow me to place eight fingers on the home keys is anathema to me, I just hate it. It's even annoying at the desktop computer when I have to use one hand to hold a cat which wants to sit on my chest; cat cuddling is compatible with reading or watching videos, not writing. I will only text to send a short message for business purposes, and even then only if my recipient clearly expects it that way. Fortunately I only deal with a couple of people who are like that.

I admit that in a noisy situation, texting eliminates the problem of not being able to hear a voice call. Though I've found that, when trying to send a text in a fast-moving situation - we're both in the same building and need to meet right away, that sort of thing - the situation is usually changed (e.g. the other person has actually found me) before I can finish writing the text.

This is rendered worse because I keep getting the backspace and delete buttons on my phone mixed up in my mind. I make a typo and want to change that one last character, and suddenly find I've erased the entire message and have to start over.

I hate texting, and I won't do casual chatting that way. Thank the Lord I'm married to a woman as quiet as I am and I'm permanently out of the dating market.

four concerts

The weekend before Thanksgiving I went to three concerts. I was reviewing two of them, but the publication of the reviews was very late. So I waited to write about them until now.

1. South Bay Philharmonic, Friday
This is the community orchestra that B. is a violist in. They gathered to play Vasily Kalinnikov's First Symphony, which I've been hearing practiced in my living room almost continuously for the past several months. You may not have heard of Vasily Kalinnikov or his First Symphony, but I had. It was written just after Tchaikovsky's death, and sounds more like a Tchaikovsky symphony than anything else that isn't a Tchaikovsky symphony. I like it a lot, and enjoyed what was I think only the second time I'd heard it live. Especially the Andante, which was haunting.

2. Redwood Symphony, Saturday
This gathering was to play Dmitri Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony, which is the Very Difficult symphony I wrote on Nov. 22 that I was facing reviewing. My review says most of it, including why I was so looking forward to hearing this, which is that it's by far the most Mahlerian symphony Shostakovich ever wrote, and the Redwood Symphony does revelatory Mahler. I didn't find this performance revelatory in terms of casting insight as to how or why the composer wrote it as he did, but it was excellently done, just sizzling. I was particularly relieved that my study sessions had enabled me to internalize this "one damn thing randomly after another" piece enough to usually know what was coming next, because it really contributed to my appreciation of this first time I'd heard the piece live.

3. Peninsula Symphony and Stanford Symphonic Chorus, Sunday
Then I went to Bing to hear something by a favorite composer that I'd never heard at all, live or otherwise. Indeed, for years I hadn't even been aware that Howard Hanson had written a final, choral, seventh symphony. He called it "A Sea Symphony." So did Ralph Vaughan Williams title his choral symphony, 65 years earlier. Hanson set poems by Walt Whitman extolling the sea and shipping on the sea. So did Vaughan Williams. Hanson wrote four movements. So did Vaughan Williams. But Vaughan Williams's symphony is an hour long, Hanson's only 20. It also doesn't sound that much like Vaughan Williams, or like Hanson either, being a bit imitative but a bit watery. I'm glad I heard it, though, and I wrote a review.

Then this week, I went to hear

4. The Chamber Music Society of San Francisco, Monday
at the Freight - which does classical chamber music occasionally - in the form of a string quartet, playing Mozart's K. 575 and Beethoven's Op. 127. Good solid performances, just not as weighty as the works deserve. Large audience, mostly grey-haired.
Distressing discovery of the evening was that almost the entire block of Center Street with the good restaurants that are convenient to the BART station has been closed down for redevelopment, and will be shut off for the next two years. One of the restaurants I like has moved, but to too far away to be convenient for a pre-Freight dinner, alas.