calimac

The late blogger Kevin Drum was under treatment for many years for multiple myeloma, which eventually killed him about a year ago. He wrote often about his medical adventures, and had particularly strong feelings about a medication he was on, a steroid named dexamethasone, which he called "the evil dex."

What exactly was evil about it he never made exactly clear, but it seems that it prevented him from sleeping, leaving him groggy all the time.

I do not have myeloma, but I have been taking intermittent courses of dexamethasone - one to four days each - and have to report differently. It doesn't seem to have caused any disruption in my sleep, which has actually been getting less disrupted lately, and though that may be because I was taking the dex in the mornings, I've had it in the afternoons with no further effect.

What it does cause is a spike in blood sugar, which has to be watched over carefully. And either it or some of the other medications I've been taking at the same time has been causing constipation, about which the less said the better.

Although I still receive a few fanzines, I consider myself retired from fanzine fandom, which is pretty much why I hadn't been to a Corflu, the annual convention of that small and elitist fraternity, in 15 years. But this one was to be in Santa Rosa, easily accessible from home, and the membership list was full of people I knew and would like to see again. So why not.

It felt like I'd never left. Conversations were resumed without any hitch. Only the visuals were startling. Many of us, and I don't except myself from this, have aged so much as to be hardly recognizable at first after a long time gap. And the number of physical infirmities and mobility aids was impressive. It's a sign of the times that, when 14 of us headed out on a group expedition to the Charles M. Schulz Museum (which I'd been to before more than once, but it's an excellent museum well worth revisiting), we all qualified for the senior discount but one, and she was given it by courtesy.

The hotel was a comfy Marriott just outside of downtown, with plenty of restaurants within walking distance, though because of my dietary restrictions I refrained from joining in. But I did risk the convention banquet, which was catered at our hotel meeting room from a Puerto Rican restaurant nearby, a favorite of Rich Coad, the convention chair. I was able to nibble at the ground beef picadillo, and some seasoned rice and beans, all delicious. It was an excellent choice of venue, at least for all of us, and the convention was altogether superbly run, so kudos to Rich and all the committee.

Interesting programming, too, curated by Jeanne Bowman. A couple panels on Bay Area fannish history, one on the Magic Cellar, which as moderator Deb Notkin aptly described it, was a nightclub that felt like home to the fans who frequented it; I was lucky enough to be one of its denizens for the last year of its existence in 1977-8. And a panel on local fandom of the 80s, which while it paid notice to the local clubs, the Little Men and PenSFA, which I frequented, concentrated on a circle focused in San Francisco some of whose members I knew well but which as a group I had no connection with.

Panels also on contemporary fan editing and APAs. I haven't belonged to an apa in 20 years, so some of the discussion of their migration away from print was news to me. I agree with the general opinion that an online discussion community isn't an apa, but the production of apazines as PDFs and their distribution over email, saving both the expense and time of physical mail - especially for international members - seemed a good idea, despite a song by Sandra Bond poking fun at the whole idea of efanzines that was sung lustily at closing ceremonies.

Of lighter programming, charades based on fanzine titles was a little dubious, especially as many of the attendees, including those tasked to do the charading, hadn't heard of some of the titles, and having them be ones we recognized was the whole point. On the other hand, slam storytelling - you get the microphone for five minutes, tell an amusing anecdote from your life - worked very well. The convention theme was pickles, so the storytellers worked that in somehow. In only a couple cases did that involve physical pickled cucumbers, but all the rest told of being in a pickle. Mostly stories of travel or of animals, or both. Tom Whitmore and Karen Anderson's story of transporting pet cats by car was perhaps the most amusing.

The Guest of Honor, name picked out of a hat as customary, was Jerry Kaufman, and his GoH speech at the banquet, on the embarrassing circumstances long ago which is why he never gives speeches, could have been another entry in the previous evening's storytelling. Past president of fwa, an honorary position chosen by acclamation, was Jeanne Gomoll. Geri Sullivan and Pat Virzi showed around the current draft of a book of Corflu memorabilia they're editing. Next year's Corflu will be in Vancouver BC, run by some of the same people running this one plus sundry.

I had a good time. I picked up a bunch of interesting-looking fanzines. I'm glad I came. Health permitting, I should resume going more often.

It would have been four in four, except that a bad side-effects reaction to medication I'd been taking laid me out for a few days including Thursday's SF Symphony all-Beethoven concert. But I was feeling better by Friday.

Friday, Stanford Department of Music
All-Mendelssohn program by recent graduates. The Octet in full, the first two movements from the Op. 49 piano trio (in the opposite order. Why? Because they think it works better that way), and the first movement from the Op. 44/1 quartet. That last item was the best: dicey technically, but brought vivid soul to the music, especially the second theme.
Held not in the usual mini-auditorium but in the rehearsal hall, where there is little space. Already there was a small crowd there when I arrived half an hour early; by showtime the audience was bursting out of the room.

Saturday, Palo Alto Philharmonic
My niece's orchestra. Audible pizzicato thumps from the string basses, which she plays. Half Debussy: Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, Nuages, Fêtes. Surprisingly technically proficient, and fairly crisp in the execution, which does Debussy more credit than he deserves. Half Tchaikovsky: the Pathétique. Rougher, without much grace but gotten through effectively.

Sunday, Junction Trio
Noe Valley Ministry concert in the City. Worth it for an exquisite Schubert Op. 99, Conrad Tao's piano merging perfectly with the strings. A little less notable for Beethoven's "Ghost" Trio, not as charming and, alas, disfigured by having alien music inserted between the ghostly Largo and the finale: an equally spooky piece by contemporary composer John Zorn supposedly inspired by the Beethoven but sounding nothing like it, instead being an entry in the "bleeps and whispers" school of ultra-modernism. Plus some early fragments by John Cage in the ethereal wispy style he cultivated when still writing conventional scores.

You know the theory for how to get a piece of cake or some such cut evenly between two people? Ask one of them to cut it and the other one to pick. That will give the cutter an incentive to cut evenly and not cheat.

But what if - I was thinking while slicing brussel sprouts in two for B.'s dinner - what if the person doing the cutting isn't very good at slicing exactly in half? Then the cutter will be cheating him/herself.

Having recently read a biography of U.S. Grant, I was primed to visit the sites of his western service in the Army, both of which sites were on the route of my driving trip.

Having graduated from West Point and done courageous and enterprising service in the Mexican War, Lieutenant Grant spent the first few peacetime years at posts on the eastern Canadian frontier, where he could have his wife and children with him. But in 1853 he was transferred to the Pacific Coast - time-consuming, dangerous, and expensive to get to, so he had to leave his family behind.

Lonely without them, bored by his routine quartermaster duties, depressed by the damp and gloomy weather, and not getting along with his commanders, Grant began to drink heavily - or not, depending on which authorities you believe. At any rate, having been promoted to Captain in the interim, after a year on the coast he resigned his commission and returned east, to face even greater personal failure as a civilian until the Civil War arrived and he found his true metier as a commanding general.

Grant served at two posts in the west, and I visited them both. There's little relic of his presence.

Fort Vancouver National Historic Site, on the Washington state side of the Columbia River opposite Portland, is built around the Hudson's Bay Company fur-trading post of that name, but it now also includes the US Army's nearby Vancouver Barracks, still a military post when I was last here. But most of the row of impressive Victorian officers' houses that now dignify the site weren't present when Grant was here. They were built by General O.O. Howard, of passing Civil War note, who was sent out here by President Grant to improve the facilities. Grant remembered having lived in crude wooden cabins, now long gone, elsewhere on the property. One full house which was here in Grant's time is called Grant House, but he didn't live in it. The site museum says a little about all this; I learned more from conversation with the curators.

Fort Humboldt State Historic Park, on a hilltop above Eureka, California, is mostly rebuilt buildings on an open lawn. Plenty of placards but no museum. The site had been saved from housing development in the late 19C by Grant fans who wanted to preserve the site, though the original buildings had been torn apart by Grant-worshipping souvenir hunters. The placards are mostly about camp life; passing note is taken of Grant's presence, but the main one on him concerns past Grant hagiography. There's still a commemorative plaque erected by the DAR; and the placard has a photo of a now long-gone ridiculously giant statue of Grant.

OK, I'm back from my trip to Portland, I'm beginning to be rested up from the rigors of the drive, and it's time to tell you what I went for.

About three months ago I learned of A Larger Reality: Ursula K. Le Guin, a major exhibit on one of my favorite authors, being held in a museum in Portland. "Well, that's nice, pity I can't get to it," I thought, but then I determined that, health permitting, I would. I'd driven to Portland before. The first weekend in February was the closing dates of the exhibit, and it appeared the ideal time to go. So, subject only to a health scare that nearly canceled the trip at the last minute, I went.

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Yes, I’m in Portland, and this concert in the large and old-fashionedly ornate (it doesn’t have restrooms, it has “lounges”) Schnitzer Concert Hall downtown turned out to be the perfect way to spend a rainy Sunday afternoon. Music Director David Danzmayr led his crackerjack orchestra through Anna Clyne’s Color Field, a typically imaginative Clyne work with some evocative open harmonies, and concluded with a thoroughly robust rendering of the Ravel orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, in which the tuba struggled a little in “Bydlo, “ but there were otherwise no problems. The orchestra has newly acquired a custom-made bell, and this clanged out like nothing you’ve heard before in the grand conclusion.

But the highlight of this concert came in between: the Bruch Violin Concerto, and it wasn’t the highlight just because the estimable Gil Shaham was soloist. I just heard this concerto last month from San Francisco, and the soloist was smooth-toned but rather characterless, while the orchestra was even bland and dull. Not this time. Here we heard why this is one of the most popular concertos in the repertoire. The orchestra was as burstingly robust as they would be in Pictures, and Shaham, though I’ve heard him perform wonders before, was simply amazing, a standing rebuke to plainer soloists. Every note had character, and his mostly high and dry tone varied tremendously, including some of the tenderest soft passages that could still be heard over the orchestra. Thrilling.

Here's yet another characterization of sf cons as unwelcoming and elitist. I find that a very strange charge. In my youth I was stepped on by all sorts of elites, but I never had any trouble finding sf cons welcoming and joyous.

But I know why this is. It's because I didn't go to sf cons with a chip on my shoulder. I had figured out that literary sf cons are about written sf literature. If you go to a focused special-interest con, you have to focus on what interest you have in that, and put other interests in abeyance for the weekend. I once went to a festival celebrating Peter Jackson's Tolkien movies. I'm famously excoriating on those, but I shut up about that for the weekend and accepted the celebration of what's good about them (and there are good things about them, just not anything having to do with Tolkien). Last month I went to a Clark Ashton Smith conference. I'd never paid more attention to Clark Ashton Smith than the length of time it took to read one or another short story by him, but for that weekend I focused on Clark Ashton Smith - and learned a lot.

And the reason these small specialty conferences are hostile to other interests is because they feel beleaguered. They're a community and they have an interest. There's a lot more comics fans than there are literary sf fans, as the size of comics cons will reveal, and they've got plenty of conventions of their own. Same with movies. If they come in to the small specialty cons, they'll drown out what the con is there for. Decades ago there was a joke in the Mythopoeic Society that Star Wars was the black hole of conversation; that once it came up, it took over the discussion.

I don't expect these cons to change their focus for me. I don't march into a literary sf con and demand to be taken as a comics fan, as the poster did. They're a community; you can join that community if you have any interest in its subject. (Some of the Clark Ashton Smith attendees had barely begun reading his work, and they weren't denigrated by the hoary old specialists, because they were showing interest; they weren't demanding the con be about something else.) Blend into the environment you're in, if you have any interest in it at all. There'll be a chance for a different environment next weekend.

PS: Kayla Allen corrected a small factual error in the post.

I missed this when it was published a year ago, but in a list of File 770's best articles of the last year I found Cat Eldridge surveying a bunch of authors on the question, "What's Your Favorite Tolkien?"

Most of them picked either The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings, indeed some hadn't read anything else by him, and a few who picked one of those two didn't like the other. A few went for the tale of Beren and Lúthien or The Children of Húrin.

The respondent who's closest to my own views is Elizabeth Hand, who picked The Lord of the Rings because "it imprinted on me at such an early age ... it was still a cult novel, and you had a real sense that you were in some secret, marvelous group of insiders who had visited a place not everyone knew about." Sort of, for me: I'm Hand's age and also imprinted on it from an early age in the 1960's. But I didn't feel part of a group of insiders; I felt terribly alone and clutched the book by myself. From my first reading at eleven, I never found anybody else who'd read Tolkien's work and wanted to talk about it until I was seventeen.* Six years, with no expectation that the durance will end, is a long time when you're that young. As a result, when I did finally find the Tolkien fans - remember that this was long before the public internet - I wanted never to leave, and I never have. Half of what makes up my life has been built around this.

As a result of that intense interest, I have, like Hand, been drawn to Tolkien's other works. She particularly notes the "History of Middle-earth" series, and says "I'm continually so amazed by what this one man came up with, the intensity and single mindedness of his obsession. And I get sucked into it all over again." And that is quite close to what I feel. Not the intensity so much as the sheer boundless creativity of one mind, its ability to deploy the illusion of reality so profoundly.

But one reason to focus on The Lord of the Rings is that it's so large. It'd probably be my choice of desert island book. But word for word, because it's quite short, my favorite Tolkien is something that nobody on the list mentioned: Smith of Wootton Major. I once wrote an article explaining why I thought it was a perfect fairy-story: partly because of what the author chose to leave out.

*I identified with a line about Gollum in The Hobbit (my introduction to Tolkien, and also a favorite): he "always spoke to himself through never having anyone else to speak to." That sums up my childhood relation to peers in a nutshell.

Jaap van Zweden, formerly of the NY Phil, conducted SFS's opening gala this year and is returning twice (this is his second of the three), making him and James Gaffigan, who's also conducting three programs, the closest things to a regular conductor that this director-less (and direction-less) orchestra has this season.

This week he was joined by the storied pianist Emanuel Ax for Mozart's Concerto No. 25, K. 503. Ax played lovely little sheens of notes, particularly shining in his delicate renditions of Mozart's curling phrases, and in some striking tone colors in the perkier moments of the finale. The orchestra was a bit more stolid. As with most other C Major orchestral works of this era, this concerto is heavy on the trumpets and the horns. Combine that with the stolidity and you get some rather dull and routine Mozart. But Ax made a good impression. He didn't play an encore, instead grabbing concertmaster Sasha Barantschik by the hand to drag him (and by courtesy the rest of the orchestra) offstage after the fourth curtain call. I've seen conductors make that move before, but never a soloist.

If Mozart was mixed, Bruckner's Seventh Symphony came out pretty well. Conducting Bruckner with skill means focusing on shaping those big paragraphs, and van Zweden had a good handle on that and on inserting the proper punctuation marks. Fairly brisk but not hurried in tempo, the music made coherent sense, though it could sometimes be less than seamless in flow. Van Zweden's only real quirk was a tendency to drop the volume suddenly in order to build it up afterwards. Balance was mostly good, though the brass in full cry would drown everybody else out even if they were all playing. The first two movements of the Seventh have more lush melodies for strings than any other Bruckner symphony, and these came out with full weight that eschewed opulence.

Most of my SFS concerts this season have been pretty packed, but for this one, though the main floor and terraces were full, the balconies were almost empty.

Usually I leave home for an SFS concert about 3.30, but I had a phone call from my doctor scheduled for 4 pm that couldn't be moved. So I was an hour later and the traffic was that much heavier. I'm driving all the way in instead of taking public transit for the last leg these days, parking in the Civic Center underground garage, and I arrived in time to have dinner at my favorite nearby Chinese place, at the cost of missing the pre-concert lecture.