calimac

My first concert of the calendar year, and almost a month since the last one.

The first time I heard Edward Gardner guest conduct SFS, I thought he led hot and sizzling performances. Half of that Edward Gardner showed up this time.

The half that didn't led the Bruch G-minor Violin Concerto. Soloist Randall Goosby had a remarkably light and smooth tone, and drove his part forward pretty well, but as an orchestral piece this was bland and dull. I wasn't too excited by the rendition of Vaughan Williams's Overture to The Wasps either, though the sound of the orchestra was unusually broad and shiny, especially in the winds.

This sound quality reappeared in places like the flute choir passages of Holst's "Saturn," and yes, The Planets was the good half of the concert. Hot and sizzling it was when the score called for it, but the most remarkable movement was the quietest, "Neptune," a most crisp and clear but delicate performance of an often-fuzzy piece. I left stripped of the forebodings I'd felt during intermission.

A discussion elsewhere of the death of Scott Adams led to a consideration of how culturally ubiquitous Dilbert was in its heyday, however astonishing that may seem to those who only know it in its sad decline.

It's one of a series of strips that have held that status, with a new one close to waiting in the wings when the previous honoree begins to fade away.

I'm not sure how culturally ubiquitous early strips now honored as pioneers were - like The Yellow Kid (1895-98) and Krazy Kat (1913-44). The earliest one that I expect hit that status was Little Orphan Annie, which premiered in 1924, followed by Popeye the Sailor Man (first appeared in Thimble Theatre 1929). Those two are still cultural touchstones today, and I suspect they were heavily popular at the time; certainly Popeye soon made the jump to animated cartoons.

The next one I know about was Barnaby by Crockett Johnson (later of Harold and the Purple Crayon fame). This strip about a little boy and his louche fairy godfather Mr. O'Malley had a short run (1942-52) and is now pretty much forgotten except among those who've collected reprint volumes of it. But it was a big hit among commentators and SF fans, at least: the Berkeley SF club, founded in 1949 and still around when I joined in the late '70s, adapted its name - the Elves', Gnomes', and Little Men's Science Fiction, Chowder and Marching Society ("Little Men" for short) - from the name of Mr. O'Malley's social club in the strip.

Barnaby kind of puttered off in its later years, and allegiance switched to Pogo by Walt Kelly, which started in 1948 and quickly became very popular, not least for its wicked political commentary, with characters like Simple J. Malarkey, a parody of Joe McCarthy. Kelly wrote songs for the strip which were published and recorded, both originals and his still-famous fractured Christmas carol lyrics, "Deck Us All With Boston Charlie."

Pogo had its several-year run as the cultural ubiquity and then faded a bit into the background, to be replaced by the biggest cultural powerhouse of them all, Peanuts by Charles M. Schulz, which started in 1950 but took a few years to hit its stride. But during the 1960s, at least, it pervaded American culture to an extent hard to believe if you didn't experience it. And its pervasiveness popped up spontaneously from outside sources. There were books about it (this one, from 1965, was a collection of Christian sermons using the strip as textual illustrations, and this unlikely thing became a bestseller); there were songs (I first heard this one sung by the kids on the bus to camp in 1966 and I still know all the lyrics); NASA even named manned spacecraft after Peanuts characters.

But the strip faded from cultural intensity quickly after 1970, despite having another 30 years to run during which it maintained its prominence on the comics page. The cultural hit of the 1970s was undoubtedly Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau, which began in 1970. Plotted more like a soap opera than any of its predecessors, Doonesbury was even more explicit politically than Pogo. (This one, among others, won Trudeau the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning.)

Doonesbury took a hiatus in 1983-4 and then rebooted itself; it was still popular, but the torch of cultural ubiquity quickly passed to Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson, which ran 1985-95; uniquely among these creators, Watterson stopped the strip before he could run out of steam. And then Dilbert, which began in 1989 and had built up its renown by the time Calvin and Hobbes signed off.

Dilbert started to fade by the mid-2000s. Since then, I dunno - newspaper strips as a cultural icon have faded with the fall of print. In my circles, maybe xkcd by Randall Munroe, which came along in a very timely fashion in 2005, but I'm not sure how commonly-known it is generally, and it's not even a strip in the traditional fashion. But that's where I think we are now.

1. Scott Adams, having alerted the world that he had terminal cancer and not much longer to live, has died, according to an announcement released today. Adams was the creator of Dilbert, one of a short list of iconic newspaper comic strips that successively defined their eras. Dilbert was a startlingly satirical strip, a standing refutation of the notion that business, because it has to make a profit, is more efficiently run than government agencies. But like other strips, even iconic ones, it outlasted its own brilliance and became tired out and hectoring, but no more so than did Adams himself, who fell down the right-wing rathole, not just in supporting DT but by being disingenuously nasty about topics like racial identification and the Holocaust. The snark that once served him well had gone rancid.

2. Neil Gaiman. I don't have to elaborate on the grief that this once-esteemed author became revealed as a truly toxic sexual predator. But if you want an elaboration on his background, and on not the origins of his offenses but on how the seeds of what made him the kind of person who could do that could be found in even his most spectacular early successes, there is an astonishing book-length (over 70,000 words) online essay by Elizabeth Sandifer on Gaiman's career. It's full of digressions: it starts with a full explanation of the background of Scientology: Gaiman's father was a leading Scientologist, and it must have affected Gaiman, though it's not clear exactly how, and even once you get past that, there are plenty more digressions on the backgrounds of Tori Amos and others who appear in Gaiman's career. But the main thread is about his writings and his career as a writer. Sandifer's thesis is that Gaiman always wanted to be a celebrated big-name author, but unlike those who just dream of it, he worked hard to make his writings deserve that status, and there's much on his innovations and creativity. But there are also warnings, of which the echoes of the author in Ric Madoc of "Calliope" are only the most obvious. But then there was a turning point when Gaiman achieved that full celebrity status, around the time of American Gods and Coraline in 2001-2. It was then, Sandifer says, that the sexual abuse which had probably been going on long already became obsessive and even more toxic, and victims described the experience as if Gaiman were enacting a script. And, Sandifer says, his writing fell off and lost its savor at the same time: the cruelest literary remark in the essay is that The Graveyard Book "feels like the sort of thing a generative AI would come up with if asked to write a Neil Gaiman story."

So I attended the one-day Clark Ashton Smith conference yesterday, held in the old Carnegie Library - now just a historical site, devoid of books or historical displays - in Smith's hometown of Auburn, California, in the foothills of the Sierras. In Smith's day this was still the city library, and the self-educated author probably got most of his education from books here.

But despite the local boosterism, accentuated by a panel discussing Smith's life here, neither Smith nor any of the panelists hailing from Auburn liked the place much. They thought it a tiresome backwater of a town. I found it charming as a one-day visitor. And my sandwich from a local deli (the con offered to fetch lunch for us if we'd order and pay in advance) was delicious.

The programming was held in the library's one large room. The organizers said the attendance was 80-90; I counted closer to 50. The attendance was largely but not entirely male. And almost all white. And largely but not overwhelmingly old.

Besides writing ornate fantasy stories, Smith also wrote SF, and he began as a once-promising poet, and he also was an artist (drawing and sculpture). The day was occupied with panels discussing all these things, and full of enlightenment on Smith's style, artistic goals, and ethos. Despite his obscurity, a case was made that he was a substantial artist worth studying.

Two panelists were particularly interesting to hear. S.T. Joshi, the well-known weird fiction scholar, is - as you'd guess from his writing - lucidly voluble and erudite. He regaled us with tales of Smith's amorous adventures, and challenged the otherwise universally-held belief that the reason Smith stopped writing weird fiction in the late 1930s was as a reaction to the deaths in short order of both his parents and his colleague/friends H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. I guess we'll find out when Joshi's biography of Smith is published later this year. I got a glimpse at a proof copy; it is not as overwhelmingly large as Joshi's Lovecraft biography.

The other liveliest panelist was the fiction author Cody Goodfellow, who read aloud the opening paragraph of Smith's "The Abominations of Yondo" in a voice so sepulchral that I'd buy a full-length recording of him reading Smith stories.

Downstairs in the basement were book dealers, but the two books I wanted to buy were only in one copy and sold to someone else before I could get them.

There wasn't a single person there I already knew, but the attendees were friendly, and I didn't feel downgraded for not being a real connoisseur or expert; there were others there who clearly had only just begun reading Smith. This was fun, the panels were all interesting throughout (including the other participants) and since this was not a far drive from home, I'm glad I took the trouble to come.

So I'm reading this book, An Immense World by Ed Yong (Random House, 2022), about animal senses, some of which are very different from our own. (But what kind of book about animals says virtually nothing about cats?) And this chapter concerns the sense of temperature, and this section is discussing animals which live under extreme temperatures.

When scientists study these so-called extremophiles, they tend to focus on adaptations like heat-reflecting hairs in their bodies or self-made antifreeze in their blood. But such adaptations would be useless if an animal's sensory system were constantly screaming it it, triggering feelings of pain. If you want to live in the Sahara, or at the bottom of the ocean, or on a glacier, you'd better tweak your sense to like it.
This concept is intuitive, and yet when we watch extremophiles, from emperor penguins braving the Antarctic chill to camels trekking over scorching sands, it's easy to think that they are suffering throughout their lives. We admire them not just for their physiological resilience but also for their psychological fortitude. We project our senses onto theirs and assume that they'd be in discomfort because we'd be in discomfort. But their sense are tuned to the temperatures in which they live. A camel likely isn't distressed by the baking sun, and penguins probably don't mind huddling through an Antarctic storm. Let the storm rage on. The cold doesn't bother them anyway.

I hope I don't have to ...

Ron Chernow, Grant (Penguin, 2017)

Chernow is the author whose biography of Alexander Hamilton inspired Lin-Manuel Miranda. I decided to see what he could do with a thousand pages on U.S. Grant, most of my reading on whom had been quite succinct.

What interests me about Grant is this: after brave and intrepid service as a junior officer in the Mexican War, he was a complete failure in the peacetime army and then in civilian occupations after he resigned his commission. But when the Civil War broke out, and men with military experience were at a premium, no matter how shoddy they might seem, as soon as he reached command level Grant showed instant assuredness and promptly became the most successful general on the Union side, a status he kept to the end despite various setbacks. How did he do this?

My conclusion is that Grant had what might be called moral courage. This is, as Grant discovered the first time he led troops into action, a different thing from personal bravery under fire. It's the courage to lead and order other men into battle, knowing that many will be wounded or killed, and then to do it again the next day. Many of the generals either shied at the idea of exposing their troops to injury or death, or were so appalled at the results when they did that they withdrew and did not press the attack - which only, Grant felt, made the war last longer and become even bloodier.

The problem with this book is that Chernow never discusses where Grant's moral courage came from or how he developed it. The very first time Grant led troops into combat was early on in the Civil War. He was a colonel looking for the camp of some Confederate raiders led by one Col. Harris, and he was extremely nervous about commanding an attack on the enemy, but when he got to the camp he found that the rebels had learned he was coming and vamoosed.

In his memoirs, Grant writes two key sentences: "It occurred to me at once that Harris had been as much afraid of me as I had been of him. This was a view of the question I had never taken before; but it was one I never forgot afterwards." Chernow quotes the first of these but not the second. He doesn't address the question of Grant's moral courage at all until he gets to the Overland Campaign of 1864, when Grant for the first time faced an opposing general with as much moral courage and tactical skill as his own, and the results were an impasse leading to grisly slaughter. But Grant carried on, despite the toll, knowing that, if he was to prevail, to withdraw and lick his wounds would be worse. Here Chernow quotes from Grant defining this courage in the way I did above, but he doesn't analyze or discuss it.

The questions that interest Chernow are very different. He is absolutely absorbed by the rumors of Grant's alcoholism. This is probably the book's major theme. Repeatedly Chernow quotes testimony swearing that Grant had been seen falling-down drunk, and repeatedly he insists that other evidence renders these stories extremely doubtful. So were these malicious lies, or what? We never learn.

In the postwar part of the book, a recurrent theme is Grant trying to make up to the Jews for an injudicious order he'd issued early in the war, expelling all Jews from the territory he controlled on the grounds of the actions of some rapacious Jewish merchants. His subsequent regret for this becomes a major theme.

Of course by the end of the war, Grant's sad earlier life had vanished from his personality. Now he was the Army's chief general, then President of the U.S., and he was used to being in command. Chernow depicts Grant as chief peacetime general in the Johnson administration as developing a degree of political savvy he'd never previously had to show, but then he depicts Grant as president and afterwards as politically naive and the constant victim of scoundrels and shysters - something that had happened during the war too, but only as a minor feature. Chernow does not attempt to reconcile the savvy and the naive Grant.

I was also puzzled by some fragmentary material testifying to hints in Grant's earlier life of the greatness he would only display later. There's a story of Gen. Taylor, the army commander in the Mexican War, coming across Lt. Grant taking charge of his men in clearing a waterway, and saying "I wish I had more officers like Grant." Wow, what a testimony. But what is the source? Endnotes reveal it's from a newspaper article published on the occasion of Grant's death 40 years later. Somehow I doubt its veracity. Elsewhere Chernow is sometimes cautious about accepting unverified stories, but not here.

There's a lot of useful and well-researched material in this book, but for all its extent I do not find that this book captures the man.

Back in 2021, I reviewed here the memoirs of every moonshot-era astronaut who'd written one. Soon afterwards, another one came out that I didn't find out about until recently. So I'm adding it.

Fred Haise (Apollo 13, STS-ALT-9, 11, 12, 14, 16), Never Panic Early: An Apollo 13 Astronaut's Journey, with Bill Moore (Smithsonian Books, 2022)
Fairly brief as these memoirs go. Haise says that at the time he was wrapped up in the nitty-gritty details of his job, and that's what this book is like too. There are occasional piercing insights into astronaut personalities (Jim Lovell under the stress of Apollo 13 started to act like the martinet Frank Borman) or of what experiences felt like to Haise, and excursions into externalities like what his living situation was like (e.g. napping in the simulator because it was too much trouble to take the time to go back to his hotel room), but no emotional reactions to problems - that's the point of his title, which he takes as a frequently-repeated personal motto - and though he notes the births of his children, there's virtually nothing about his life with them or his wife.
That's because he was so busy working he didn't have one, and that, he says, is the reason he eventually got divorced: no connection with his family. But Haise's workaholic attitude has its virtues in this book. Like other astronauts, he found that flying came naturally to him when he first undertook it, but unlike most he goes into detail about what learning to do it actually consisted of. His detail on the Apollo 13 mission is a useful supplement to the movie version, but he only mentions the movie once briefly and makes no direct comparisons or corrections.
After Apollo 13, Haise plunges into equal detail on the subsequent publicity junkets before going back to work on flight training, including flying many of the space shuttle's approach and landing tests, though he retired from NASA before any actual shuttle missions flew, then going to work as an administrator for the aerospace firm that he knew well because they'd built the lunar module. He also recounts the detail of his gruesome medical recovery from a plane crash.
But the hasty tone and lack of some detail remains a flaw. Haise recounts being told, after serving as backup on Apollo 8, that he'd be backup again for Apollo 11, without mentioning that he was bumped from the prime crew (the usual followup) or why - he was pre-empted by the more senior Mike Collins, who returned to flight status following surgery (Collins tells that story apologetically in his book).

previous posts on astronaut memoirs
introduction
Mercury Seven
Next Nine
Group Three
Original Nineteen

Fr John R Blaker posted on FB that his close friend, and sometime my friend also, Eric Larson, "has taken his own life. His wife Pat Larson had cardiac arrest on December 23 and was 20 minutes without pulse. She was on life support with no brain function until a few days ago."

I'm so very sorry about all of this. I hadn't seen Eric in many years - probably since before he was married; I knew he had been but I don't recall ever having met Pat - but he and John and I were part of a circle of undergraduate science-fiction fans at UC Berkeley in the late 1970s. That's where I knew Eric best from.

We had two Erics in the group. The other was called Eric the Red for his hair color. Eric Larson was Eric the Large. He was very tall, and broadly built, and he had an immeasurably deep voice, which he later parlayed into a role as the PA Voice of God at various sf convention costume presentations.

Eric was a friendly guy, pleasant to be around, a valued member of our little community. Bless his memory.

A while ago I saw a notice that a day's conference on the works of Clark Ashton Smith was being held in January. I've never read much of Smith's fiction, though I've collected several books of it, and since attendance was limited I decided to sign up: I might learn something, if I was able to go. It's next weekend, and it looks as if I can. It's in Auburn, the Sierra foothills town where Smith lived most of his life, about 3 hours drive from here.

The organizers are asking each of their attendees to name their favorite Smith story. I never really thought in terms of having a favorite Smith story, but I decided on the one with a contemporary setting - a rarity for Smith, who usually preferred lost continents or decadent future ones - whose first line reads "I have seldom been able to resist the allurement of a bookstore." I can identify with that.

Concurrently, in the context of a Zoom meeting commemorating Tolkien's birthday, which was yesterday, we were asked for favorite moments from the legendarium, and I chose for a favorite single line one of Treebeard's from The Lord of the Rings: "I am not very, hm, bendable." I can identify with that one too, and I quote it often.

Renewing and extending my acquaintance with Smith, I find that I like him to the extent that he resembles Dunsany, which he occasionally does. (I have similar feelings about Lovecraft.) Smith's language is more ornate than Dunsany's, which is already ornate enough; and he's more caustic than Dunsany, who is already caustic enough. His plots don't quite land with Dunsany's punch. But despite Smith's esoteric vocabulary, I find his storytelling to be gratifyingly clear: I always understand where I am and what's going on, not true of many of today's highly-touted fantasy authors. My biggest problem with Smith is that, after a few impressive repetitions, I get a little wearied of his favorite recurrent plot, which is of greedy or power-mad people getting their due comeuppance in a truly nasty supernatural manner.

Though I can think of one greedy and power-mad person today who really deserves a due comeuppance in a truly nasty supernatural manner. O for a Clark Ashton Smith to chronicle it.

This is the way I wish more commentators would write about sports (from a roundup of the new year's highlights by Dieter Kurtenbach in the Mercury News yesterday, and thanks to B. for spotting it):

Super Bowl LX - Billionaires' BBQ (Feb. 8): The Super Bowl returns to Levi's Stadium. Get ready for two weeks of national media complaining about the lack of shade in a game played at night, and the fact that San Francisco is actually a 45-minute drive from the stadium (on a good day, which this won't be). It's the biggest party in the world for a bunch of people you'd never invite to a party, hosted in a corporate office park. Fitting.
But, hey, maybe the 49ers will be in it.

This is technical hell, not bureaucratic hell, because the bureaucracy is not really the problem, the technology is the problem.

A few days ago our tv set stopped working. If we turned it on, we got an error message saying it couldn't connect to the wireless network. (The wireless network is otherwise fine, a point I had to keep making to the technicians I talked with.)

Having been otherwise occupied earlier, I've spent most of my New Year's Day in phone calls and chats, first with my ISP (AT&T), which had me cancel the network and try to reinstall it, which didn't work. They said they could find no problem, so it must be the tv set. The tv manufacturer couldn't find any problem with the tv set, so they said the ISP must have updated to 5G, which my tv set (which is only two years old) can't handle. I should have known enough to point out to them that we're on copper wire, which AT&T told me couldn't handle 5G, so we were on exactly the broadband width that the manufacturer told me to tell the ISP to put me on.

Impasse. AT&T is going to send me new equipment, which will come in over a week. I doubt that will help either.

Oh, it's been a quiet year. My only scholarly writings were the annual bibliography and my contributions to "The Year's Work in Tolkien Studies," both in the volume of Tolkien Studies that came out in 2025 but was dated 2024. I co-edited that volume, but as I've retired that'll be the last one. Though I've signed up to do the next bibliography, and I may be back in the "Year's Work," though that's going in abeyance for the next issue.

I also had a report on the Mythopoeic Society's online conference, copied from this blog and put in the Society's newsletter, Mythprint.

And 22 formal concert reviews published online, the last in October. There will be no more of those, at least for a while until my health gets sorted out.

Places I've stayed overnight away from home:
South San Francisco, CA
Pittsburgh, PA
Ashland, OR
Brisbane, CA
Santa Clara, CA

Two overnight trips up to the City, one for a conference and one for a series of concerts in close temporal proximity, both times staying in airport hotels just outside of the City where it's cheaper; one glorious trip to my brother's wedding far away, my only plane flights of the year; one drive to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival; and, sigh, another stay in the hospital.

1. Here's an evaluation of all of Rob Reiner's movies, in which, if you follow along, you'll see that the authors consider his eight best movies to be eight of his first nine movies. (The clunker is, of course, North, and if it and The American President had been flipped chronologically, the best eight would have been the first eight.) So what happened? The authors think that the instincts that led Reiner right in his early days went wrong in his later ones.

I've seen six of the eight best (somehow I've missed The Sure Thing and I wouldn't see Misery on a bet) and enjoyed all six*; the only one of his later movies I've seen is LBJ, which was not bad but was carried mostly by Woody Harrelson's performance in the title role. The thing is that I never found Reiner a particularly good director in the technical sense - the climbing of the Cliffs of Insanity in The Princess Bride was embarrassingly clumsy - but in his good movies he was great in other ways: his versatility in genre (the guy who made Spinal Tap made A Few Good Men? Amazing), brilliant casting all around (that's what really knocked my socks off about Princess Bride in particular), and his ability to let the script and the acting shine through.

*Though I enjoyed When Harry Met Sally, I bristled at Harry's contention that all men are like him. If there's one thing I've learned from life, it's that people are different. Reiner and Nora Ephron may have based Harry on himself, but I am not like that and neither are most of the men I know.

2. Saw an article somewhere in which Sam Altman was quoted as saying that you can't raise a child without the help of A.I. Here's not the original article but a more critical commentary. Apparently the A.I.'s job is to reassure you that you're not screwing up. Dr. Spock said pretty much the same thing; why don't you just read him? Because you can be sure that, though he might be wrong, he's not just making crap up, which A.I. is prone to doing. When ChatGPT first showed up, I experimented by asking it some tough musical questions I knew the answers to, and it only seriously messed up some but rarely got everything totally right.

Once I learned what it does, I would never ask A.I. for advice on anything real. In practice, I use it only to remind me when I need a word I know but which has slipped my mind, which happens depressingly often these days, maybe once a month. The last one was "foyer." At least then I know the answer is right when I see it.

I certainly wouldn't ask it to draft any writings for me. I wonder if I would ask it to do so if I still had to write anything that I struggled with the wording of. But the writing I had most trouble with was job application letters, and that requires personalized stuff the A.I. wouldn't know. So probably not.

3. But one technical advance I am very happy with is the U.S. Post Office's "Daily Digest" which sends you an e-mail early each morning showing the envelopes you're expected to receive that day. (Mailers, magazines, and packages are excluded, though it does tell you how many packages to expect.) So if a bill doesn't come, that's because your delivery person is running behind, and if it doesn't come the next day, that's when you call the biller and ask them to send another copy.

British newspaper article by Anna Bonet, listing "The 14 children's classics every adult should read." Most of them British, of course. Organizing them by my experience with them, they are:

Read in childhood
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
Watership Down by Richard Adams
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The Railway Children by E. Nesbit
The Hobbit I encountered at 11, and it changed my life. I would not be most of the things I am today if I had not read The Hobbit. The Railway Children I remember enjoying at about the same age, but I haven't seen it since. I know Nesbit mostly through adult introduction to her as a foundational children's fantasist. Alice and The Little Prince were OK, but didn't really grab me. Watership Down wasn't published in the US until I was 17, but that was the perfect age to find it. Not even excepting Earthsea, which has a different feel, it is the only post-Tolkien epic fantasy with the same sweep and power. (Most of them are utter crap.)

Failed to read in childhood
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
One of two classics I was given in childhood that I utterly bounced off of; the other was one of C.S. Forester's Hornblower novels. I did like Tom Sawyer.

First read in adulthood
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
The Wind in the Willows, which I picked up at about 24, is the one children's classic that I didn't encounter until adulthood that has become as dear to me as my childhood favorites. I read the entire Narnian saga when I joined the Mythopoeic Society at 18, having previously ignored Lewis; I found them thin and not particularly appealing. The other two I don't remember when I read them, but only once each. They were OK, but I find I rather preferred their cinematic adaptations.

Not read
Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild
The Enchanted Wood by Enid Blyton
Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell
I think I may have picked up the Durrell at one point, but I didn't read much if so. I had a different encounter with Streatfeild, as I had another book of hers as a child, The Children on the Top Floor, which I did like very much (and still do, actually). Enid Blyton was completely unknown in the US in my childhood, though she's seeped in a little since then. I'd heard of Anne of Green Gables but never ran across it.

The huge 'wine country gift box' I brought home from the Christmas gift exchange measures 23 x 12 x 10 with the lid closed, which was only possible to do after I removed all the wine bottles and those snacks I wouldn't care to eat (which I gave to B., figuring correctly that she'd like most of them, and the rest she could take to the snack table of her orchestral rehearsals). It was also so heavy that I shouldn't have carried it intact from the car into the house. It proved to contain:

6 bottles of wine (4 reds, 2 whites including a sparkling; 3 from Sonoma County and one each from Napa, Paso Robles, and Oregon)
8 boxes of various cookies
3 of biscuits, one with fruit filling (some of the cookies were also labeled biscuits, apparently in French)
6 of various crackers and hard breads
3 pastries
3 veggie snacks (2 asparagus, 1 olive)
1 each of madeleines, brownies, snack mix, kettle corn, jellies, ginger chews, lemon cakes, dip mix, dipping sauce, olive oil, hummus, and spreadable cheese

Most of the wine is probably destined to be regifted, but when will we manage to eat the rest of this stuff?

The downpour was severe most of the way up, and all the way back, to/from our niece T's house for Christmas dinner. This and the lighter rain we've been getting for the past week have been the first precipitation in over a month, so we ought to be glad to have it, local flooding nonwithstanding.

Inside, it was warm and cozy, though a bit underpopulated due to various constraints. Still, T's husband and both of their sons were there, including the one who's attending university a couple thousand miles away, and so were my brother and his wife, visiting from their home which is even slightly farther away. Another visitor was C., a supervisee of T's from work who's from Singapore and had no chance to celebrate with relatives, so she invited him over to her house.

T. insisted that we all participate in the all-food white elephant gift exchange, promising B. that she wouldn't get stuck with an assortment of hot sauce as happened one year. Most of the gifts were chocolate and/or wine. C. was mystified by opening presents in the presence of the giver, which is not the custom among his people. I got the last item nobody wanted to take, a huge 'wine country gift box' that T. was given as a reward for some professional service. It appears to have crackers and olive oil, among other things, in addition to wine. But I don't know what else is in it, because it's still out in the trunk of my car. Although it's wrapped in plastic, I didn't want to struggle in with it in the rain. Tomorrow is supposed to be lighter and the rain goes away after that.

For the dinner, I made my broccoli with garlic and cashews that had been such a success at Easter, and it was mostly devoured, despite being a large batch. So that was gratifying.

But now we're glad to have gotten safely home, and so are the cats, who'd been wondering when they were going to be fed.

45-minute CBS documentary on Rob Reiner. Really thoughtful and insightful views of the man, mostly from actors he directed in his films. A couple of them (both men, by the way) even break down in tears while talking about him. Also plenty of clips from interviews with Reiner, the movies, and All in the Family. Very much worth watching if you're at all interested in Reiner or his movies. It's amazing that the makers were able to put together such a polished and substantial piece of work in such a short time.

Watch on YouTube

John Scalzi is still on the comfort movie circuit, and last night's entry was Notting Hill. I've seen that movie, but only once when it was new, but Scalzi's essay is mostly about a principal topic of that movie, which is the effects of being famous, and I do have some thoughts about that.

I wouldn't go up and speak to a famous person I saw just because they were famous, but a couple times I've been in the presence of an actor or author I admired in a position where I ought to say something. So I just said, "I admire your work; thank you for doing it," because I couldn't go into any more detail without burbling.

By author I mean outside the sf/fantasy field, because there we're both parts of the community and can converse on a more equal basis, and some of them I'm friends with anyway. There are 3 or 4 notable fantasy authors, all women by the way, whom I was already friendly with before they'd ever published anything.

When I lived in Seattle in the early 80s, there were several authors who were part of a fairly close-knit fan community: F.M. Busby (who was called Buz), Vonda N. McIntyre, Joanna Russ. One time when I was visited by friends who were fans but not part of this particular community, I took them along to a fan-community party. I didn't tell them until we arrived that it was at Joanna Russ's house, and they were properly croggled. (I had of course gotten Joanna's permission to bring guests along.)

I've had one brief experience at being famous, within the environment I was existing in. I define topical fame as a situation where everybody's heard of you but few of them know you personally. This was when I was an invited guest speaker at a Tolkien conference at Marquette University, which holds his papers, in 2004. (And which gave rise to this proceedings.) Unlike at a Mythcon, where I know most of the attendees and consequently didn't feel "famous" even when I was Guest of Honor, here I didn't know much of anybody except the other presenters, but they all knew me.

It was a deeply weird experience, I found. People I didn't know kept wanting to come up and talk with me. It was within the context of the conference, so they weren't random accosters like the guy Scalzi describes making a pitch to Tom Hanks. And they had no self-aggrandizing agenda, they just wanted to talk about Tolkien, which I'm happy to do. I kept fretting inwardly over whether I was being polite enough. I'm rather introverted and not very socially adept, so I wasn't sure if I was being good at this. My biggest relief was when I left campus by myself and wasn't famous any more, which - as Scalzi points out - is exactly what the truly famous can't do.

It occurs to me that, instead of a movie about a famous person dating a random everyman, as in Notting Hill, we could have a story about a relationship between two famous people from totally different walks of fame. And we do: it's Katy Perry and Justin Trudeau. (I suppose Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce might qualify, too, though a sports star's fame isn't as different from a pop singer's as a politician's is, and I'm not sure how walk-down-the-street famous Kelce was before he and Swift started dating.)

I attended a piano recital in San Francisco on Sunday. It just wasn't the piano recital I'd intended to go to.

The one I'd intended would have been Sarah Cahill playing music by Terry Riley in a meeting room of the main SF Public Library at 2 p.m. The occasion was to honor Riley's 90th birthday, which was last June. Riley was one of the founding fathers of the minimalist movement in the early 1960s, though he's reinvented himself several times since then, and Cahill is an indefatigable proponent of new and unusual music; she was, among other things, one of the tag team of pianists who played Philip Glass's complete Etudes some years back.

But when I got to the library I found the building closed due to a power outage. This, I eventually learned, had begun the previous evening, but I hadn't heard about it. This was irksome, especially as I'd checked the website that morning to confirm the concert was still on. The power outage was widespread, but in spots, and this particular spot covered just a few blocks around the library. Not a concert in sight.

But! Earlier, on my way to lunch, which I had at a Chinese place nearby but well outside the outage zone, I'd walked past a pizzeria which had, taped to its front window, a small notification of a concert of Bach on the piano, to be held at a church in the Mission District at 3 p.m. "Too bad Cahill's concert won't be over by then," I thought, but when I found the library closed, I simply changed my plans.

So instead of Riley I heard Bach's seven keyboard toccata suites (BWV 910-916) played on a Baldwin baby grand in a 19th-century Lutheran church across the street from Mission Dolores. The pianist, whose name was Michiko Murata, was really good. Too bad there were only about 20 people there to hear her.

She played crisply and emphatically, with clean separation of parts and with the call-and-response patterns so basic to Bach clearly enunciated. It was 90 minutes of the master of intricate counterpoint showing his chops, and with this clarity of enunciation it was sheer pleasure to hear.

Fortunately there was a brief intermission halfway through, and I returned from the long trudge to the men's room just in time to see Murata in the sanctuary's foyer, about to make her entrance. "You're back," she said to me. "I thought you'd left." This is something you can say when your audience is so small you can count them. "Oh no," I replied, "I've got to hear how this comes out." (With one of Bach's few excursions into the major mode, as it turned out.)

John Scalzi's 'comfort watch' for yesterday was A Fish Called Wanda. I find I have some thoughts about that movie:

I agree with Scalzi that it's a fabulously funny movie, which I enjoyed tremendously on first watching. And for a long time afterwards, too, but on more recent rewatches I've found myself enjoying it somewhat less. (Except for Otto, a character so terminally stupid and fearlessly portrayed by Kevin Kline that way, that this still works.)

What I'm finding less appealing is what Scalzi calls the 'cringe humor.' Normally, like him, I dislike humor relying on embarrassing sympathetic characters, but Wanda was funny enough to immunize itself against this. But maybe as I've gotten more used to the scenario, the immunity wears off.

Scalzi mentions a couple forms of humor that probably wouldn't pass muster in a film made today. One is what he calls casual homophobia. I don't think that Otto trying to disconcert Ken by pretending to be sexually attracted to him is actually homophobic as the term is normally used. Ken isn't being repulsed at the existence of homosexuals, just at being propositioned himself. He's not shown as homophobic, just as emphatically not homosexual himself.

The line that Otto steps across is that of verbal sexual harassment, and that's objectionable regardless of the sexual orientation of anyone involved. If Otto were to treat a woman that way, it'd be perfectly understandable for her being as uncomfortable with it as Ken is.

The other problematic source of humor is Ken's stutter. Here again it's not that simple. The character who mocks Ken is Otto, and that's part of showing what a nasty and unsympathetic person Otto is. Wanda and George are comfortable dealing with Ken, whose stutter is less severe when talking with them - obviously it becomes stronger under stress.

Which leaves the encounter between Ken and Archie, when they're both frantic and accordingly Ken's stutter becomes very severe. It seems to me the source of humor here is not the stutter but Archie's frustration in dealing with it (his impatience, while understandable, is a flaw in his character). But I shouldn't be surprised if those with stutters disagree about that.

Scalzi says to ignore the plot, but there's a plot problem with the movie that weighs on me more over time. The reason Wanda seduces Archie is because Archie is George's lawyer and might know where George has hidden the diamonds. Perhaps it's Wanda's unfamiliarity, as an American, with the British legal system that trips her up here, because, as the barrister, Archie is merely a hired hand; he has little direct contact with George and is not in his confidence. The person who is in George's confidence is his solicitor, who is George's actual lawyer in the normal sense, and he does know about the diamonds, as is shown by his passing secret messages between George and Ken. It's the solicitor, not the barrister, whom Wanda should have seduced, but the solicitor is a minor character and, unlike Archie, he's not sexy, so there'd be no movie there.

Profile

calimac

January 2026

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
				1	2	3
4	5	6	7	8	9	10
11	12	13	14	15	16	17
18	19	20	21	22	23	24
25	26	27	28	29	30	31

Syndicate

Page Summary

Style Credit

Style: by timeasmymeasure

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Jan. 17th, 2026 05:45 am

Recent Entries

concert revew: San Francisco Symphony

ubiquitous comic strips

men who sank their own reputations

an author named Smith

quotation

Grant

astronaut memoirs: a supplement

Eric Larson

Smith and Tolkien and Dunsany

sports snark

technical hell again

the annual year-end post

year's last miscellanea

children's classics

and it contained ...

I'm dreaming of a wet Christmas

on Rob Reiner

fame

piano recital: a review and an adventure